(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:25 am)
Editor’s note: In honor of TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY, today’s post has been pirate-speaked!
One o’ me productivity-killin’ attitudes be th’ great loathin’ I be havin’ fer physically fetchin’ things. If I I dasn’t be havin’ th’ pair o’ scissors / socks / wrench / gadget I need ready, then I lose momentum an’ focus. One o’ th’ most difficult things fer me t’ do be t’ mail a physical package, as ‘t requires so much fetchin’ that I nereget around t’ doin’ ‘t. I finally mailed a package t’ Dad, fer example, an’ ‘t tookst me about…goodness, about six moons. Embarrassin’!
Wi’ me recent thoughts on maintainin’ a positive attitude, however, I`ve been timing how long things take. That turns th’ chore into an experiment, which transform a chore into a quantifiable datapoint. As I wrote recently on me Facebook Page a wee tides ago, I be surprised at how wee time ‘t tookst t’ do two annoyin’ tasks: filin’ bill statements an’ shreddin’ checks. I let these pile up sometimes fer moons, but when timed ‘t tookst less than two minutes per task.
This mornin’ I be sittin’ down at th’ dinin’ room table t’ fiddle wi’ somethin’, an’ noticed that th’ table needed t’ be wiped. That required: PAPER TOWEL an’ WINDEX. I also reckoned I needed PAIR O’ SCISSORS from downstairs an’ WALLET from upstairs. I felt th’ familiar inner groan an’ urge t’ go do somethin’ else, but instead I started countin’ seconds in me hade. I sailed’ upstairs an’ downstairs an’ then t’ th’ galley, an’ th’ average time be under 30 seconds. Jus’ about anythin’ in th’ house be accessible t’ me, gi’en that I know ‘ere ’tis, in about 30 seconds. Which makes me feel silly an’ dumb fer bein’ such a baby about fetchin’ things, but lookin’ fore I can be seein’ much more fetchin’ in me future :)
3 Comments
Dave –whenever I think I am “getting nothing done” (and the anxiety about it is rising) –I pull out a copy of the Emergent Time Tracker (ETT) and start tracking my day, and record absolutely everything. I do this for several days. If I’m not sleeping enough, it takes two sheets for a 24 hour period. Either I’m already doing more than I thought, or the act of keeping careful record of EVERYTHING on the ETT changes my trajectory, and I find I’m doing a million things that I was counting as “anything.” That said –I know exactly what you mean about being over-run with inertia, or feeling “Lazy” and unable to do X, Y, or Z that would literally take two minutes or less, and the X, Y’s and Zs are quickly adding up; point being, don’t feel alone here, there’s a world of us knowledge workers, pseudo geeks and geeks who are exactly like you, which is one reason you can speak so eloquently for us.
Another topic –your new “book outliner” form(s) struck a cord in me. While I don’t often read whole books these days, I read a large number of articles and manuscripts –some are easy of course, blogs, internet-based reports etc, but many are more technical, appearing in professional journals and are hell to read. All of my reading (and my students’ reading), if I’m honest with myself, get lost in a jumble of the collective knowledge input every 24 hours, and I can’t remember who said, who studied, or who wrote, what. In addition, I assign articles, blogs, (technical journals and magazines etc etc) and books to my students, and I know they are ALSO reading piles of materials while preparing dissertation proposals (or at an earlier stage, deciding upon and fine tuning a topic).
My first thought: “This form may serve for everything we read, not just books” and having already printed some out, I grabbed one and used it while re-reading an article I had assigned to my students, to be discussed in an upcoming week. The results were stellar –it improved my concentration and retention, I was ready for the seminar discussion ( l teach 3rd year doctoral students, in a “Professional Development Seminar.”) In addition, I was able to “demonstrate” the use of this tool for the students who have a frightening amount of rather technical reading to cover each and every week. We are early in the school year (we’re on a trimester system) and just beginning the mini GTD training I offer at the beginning of this three trimester seminar (we read “GTD” before we move on to “How to write a dissertation proposal.” I begin the year with “How to manage your time and organize your life” and “How to figure out next actions etc.”) My students were interested. As I passed out copies, I observed that everyone wanted at least a few of them. I will put the PDF file(s) on line in our seminar “conference.” I told them about you, as they will be hearing your name on and off all year and receiving copies of forms you’ve developed, that as an academic and researcher, I find particularly useful.
So thank you once again for somehow knowing what some of us are working on –the beginning of the school year! And thanks for the post today (or was it yesterday?) about taking the 30 seconds to run up and down stairs, to grab something that you need to take the “less than two minutes” to fulfill some obligation or engage more effectively in work/life maintenance, Every time you hit a glich, or a wall, in your own daily life and you see things begin to unravel, you put it out there, it resonates with people like you (me for example) and it ends up inspiring us to follow your example, run up the stairs to get something that makes it possible to do the task in 2 minutes or less.
As part of our social nature, we’re an imitating species. You do, I follow you and then I also do. When you said recently that Twyla Tharp’s “The Creative Habit” was the best book you’ve read, I ordered it from Amazon, and you are right, it’s brilliant.
Thank you for getting the nerve to describe our little flaws and failings, for offering up creative solutions that you’re trying out & that might work. Thank you for those book reviews. By way of apology for being perhaps long-winded, I thought I would let you know what’s been particularly helpful from your posts over the last few weeks. Thank your for all it!
Lynn, you rock! Thank you, from my heart! :)
I’m curious about how you’re using the sheet with articles, which don’t have enough page numbers to work in a way that make correlation easy. Maybe it’s just the act of writing it down?
Articles have page numbers, so I use those. Obviously don’t need 100 pages for article, so use the top sheet of the one with most space for notes. I’ll let you know if I keep it up, and if my students report anything back about using it.
One problem I grapple with (in general) is electronic reading which I do a great deal of. In kindle downloads (which I read on my computer or iPad) there aren’t pages, there’s a number, but I have failed to reliably be able to convert that to page numbers. Perhaps there is a way to ensure that number converts to page numbers, but I’ve failed to find out how to do that. This is a problem if I want to refer to specific pages. Too often if a book or other document I read online turns out to be “important” I end up ordering a hard copy of same. Clearly this is costly and inefficient. Are others having this same problem with kindle etc. reading?