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Productivity
Nov. 26th, 2011 10:32 amI've been working on it for a while, now. I was seriously doing absolutely nothing for a time, which was a grief-stricken thing, I know, but also instructive. I learned, for example, that I can do very very little and be okay with the results. Chaos and uncertainty, not so bad. Also, that doing nothing at all is attractive in a way that doing very little is not - it's like free versus costs a penny.
Anyway, I'm up to 20 minutes of being productive at a time (22 starting tomorrow!), and I just learned about the Pomodoro Technique which is apparently built around 25 minute stretches of focussed effort, so I'm looking into that. Of course, that's supposed to be 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest and then more working, and what I currently do is 20 minutes of work followed by 40 minutes of not working, or way more resting than that, so I'll have to figure out what I'm currently capable of. But it's promising. At some point not too long from now I'm going to have to be able to get through an 8 hour day of doing something that someone is willing to pay me for. It is not quite as unimaginable a feat as it was a few months ago, but I don't think I could do it two days in a row, much less 5, right now.
I use Omnifocus to organize my To Dos, and I'm kind of locked into it just because I have so much in there already. There are times, like right now, when my To Do list is just something I look at and think "look at all the stuff I'm not even going to try to accomplish today", but other times it is satisfying to get through some serious backlog, so I'm sticking with my hundreds of overdue tasks. It doesn't bother me, all the not completed to dos I have hanging over me, which is it's own kind of problem, probably, but I am okay with the consequences of that so far as I can anticipate them, so that's all right.
Anyway, I'm up to 20 minutes of being productive at a time (22 starting tomorrow!), and I just learned about the Pomodoro Technique which is apparently built around 25 minute stretches of focussed effort, so I'm looking into that. Of course, that's supposed to be 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest and then more working, and what I currently do is 20 minutes of work followed by 40 minutes of not working, or way more resting than that, so I'll have to figure out what I'm currently capable of. But it's promising. At some point not too long from now I'm going to have to be able to get through an 8 hour day of doing something that someone is willing to pay me for. It is not quite as unimaginable a feat as it was a few months ago, but I don't think I could do it two days in a row, much less 5, right now.
I use Omnifocus to organize my To Dos, and I'm kind of locked into it just because I have so much in there already. There are times, like right now, when my To Do list is just something I look at and think "look at all the stuff I'm not even going to try to accomplish today", but other times it is satisfying to get through some serious backlog, so I'm sticking with my hundreds of overdue tasks. It doesn't bother me, all the not completed to dos I have hanging over me, which is it's own kind of problem, probably, but I am okay with the consequences of that so far as I can anticipate them, so that's all right.