Tasks that should take less than an hour have been known to take me all day to finish, or sometimes multiple days. Sometimes part of this is over-producing, part of it is wanting to make sure I get it right. But most of the time I lose time because of distractions.
Hey, it's not my fault, right? We live in a world of distractions and diversions, where every few minutes something new, genuinely interesting, and worth knowing becomes available at a click. Or funny comics, or unopened safes, or whatever.
It's rather unfortunate that the thing I use for most of my personal work and the thing I use to goof off the most are one and the same thing. It can be very difficult to separate my working self from the careless person who sees that two hours out of the three available for a project have been spent goofing around, and goes immediately back to goofing around rather than getting back to business.
So how do we fix it?
I've developed a simple rule: ONE THING AT A TIME.
When I'm looking at facebook on my phone and realize I no longer understand what's happening on the show/movie I'm watching, I put my phone away.
When I've only got a certain amount of time to get a project done, and I realize I have more than one browser tab open, I close all the tabs not related to the task at hand, with the maximum number allowed open being ONE.
When I realize I have two laptops open so that I can type and watch Netflix at the same time, and that typing isn't happening as quickly as it should, I close one of the laptops.
It's super, super weird to me how we're drifting towards an entertainment culture, and probably a professional culture (and eventually just a culture itself) where giving our attention to one thing isn't enough. For me it's mainly put on the TV, then open the laptop. I do this almost every day, it's unstoppable. But what troubles me is when I do this, I remember neither the thing I watched, nor what I looked at on the computer. Dividing my brain between two or more things seems to be a really great way of making time completely disappear. Ya know, without getting hungover, I guess.
It's a constant struggle to actually keep this rule in place and in effect, but I guess if I didn't need it anymore it could stop being a rule and go away. There are strange laws on the books in certain towns like "you can't tie an alligator to a mailbox" or similar, and they must have been written down for a reason. Maybe one day I won't need ONE THING AT A TIME anymore, but until then I do my best to keep it in mind, and make sure I'm doing it, say about as often as I remember CTRL+S.
Now that I've convinced you of how I stick to this rule, let me introduce
THE EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE
Like the rule itself they come and go, some wind up being really useful, some wind up being clearly just a way of getting around the rule completely, and I have to get rid of them in order to keep productive.
Of course, if I even want to STOP being productive, I guess I could bring those exceptions back, or drop the rule altogether. This isn't outside the realm of possibilities, but so far I tend to like me better when I've gotten at least some things done, so for now the rule and its good exceptions stay! But it's worth mentioning some bad exceptions for potential entertainment value.
Good Exception: It's Okay if You Don't Divide Each of Your Senses
What I mean by this is, I tend to do fine if I'm doing one thing with my sense of sight and my ability to type and use a cursor (i.e. writing or editing, etc.), and another thing with my sense of hearing (i.e. listen to music, a podcast, a familiar movie, or an audiobook).
The key to using this exception is the following graph:
If you're folding laundry, or doing the dishes, or shunting files around the hard drive to make sense of that bizarre nightmare land you've labeled your "important documents" folder, then an audiobook or a TV show you don't mind missing the visuals to is A.O.K.
But if it's composition, or work that requires concentration, or composition, or keeping up a text conversation with someone in some way, or composition, or composition, or , the speakers should be on mute.
The exception to my exception has become music without words are okay, even while writing. It was about this time that my music library began to double in size with instrumental/trip-hop and movie/video game soundtracks (I recommend almost anything by Koh Otahni, Hans Zimmer, Joe Hisaishi, Ramin Djawadi, or sometimes Howard Shore. For some reason James Horner and John Williams is often a little too jumpy for me, but to each her own).
Bad Exception: It's Okay If You've Seen The Other Thing Before
Go ahead, my scumbag brain says, the TV's already on. You need some background noise to get the juices flowing, why not just replay season three of Futurama? That's the one with a lot of great stories and Bender lines. Who am I kidding they're all great. It won't be distracting, you've seen it a hundred times before.
While it's true that I tend to half-listen to old things and full-listen to new things as a matter of course, the problem with this exception is actually that most of the time, when I do it, I find myself distracted by other things in the end. I'll come to and like thirty browser tabs are open, and none of them have to do with my project, and
Good Exception: Keep that Thesaurus Handy
Along with a music playing program, I tend to keep my electronic dictionary/thesaurus booted up in case I need to check anything. Or I'll close it down, and re-open it in five minutes. It's a handy resource, and generally when I'm done with it, I put it back down again.
Bad Exception: Can't Keep Writing Now, First This Point Requires Research!
Oh Wikipedia, you gloriously landscaped pit where my time goes to die. Theoretical physics speculates that if you were able to lower yourself within a certain distance of a large black hole, but not get pulled in, waited a while, and then raised yourself back out, you would find that more time had passed for the rest of the world than had for you. This is also true of ad hoc internet research, or so I speculate -- I want so badly to open another tab and check to make sure I don't have that fun fact backwards, but if I do that I'll never finish this post.
A solution to this problem is one I also use when I want to google random things while at work and I know they're keeping an eye on my computer activity: I carefully write down everything I want to google on a post-it to look up at home, then lost the post-it and forget I ever wrote anything on it, because 10/10 none of those things were important to me anyway.
Just kidding: I make a note in my piece of things I need to know to refine later, put it on a list, and look it up when I'm no longer in ONE THING AT A TIME mode.
Good Exception: I've been at it for two hours, I should stretch my legs.
The key to keeping up ONE THING AT A TIME for as long as possible is, surprisingly, to keep up ONE THING AT A TIME for as long as possible.
What I mean is, when you need to take a break, don't take a break from limiting your attention to just one thing. Do just one thing with your time off before getting back to business: actually go for a walk, or get a snack and eat it and clean the dish, or check your email until the inbox is empty (never a satisfying break task for me, but again to each her own). If you have more than one thing you need to fit in to your time away from the computer, handle things in sequence: get one thing ALL THE WAY FINISHED, then start the next thing. I try not to whip out my smart phone while I'm waiting for my food to microwave, not because it's evil to do so, but because once I start again, I'm not likely to get back to work anytime soon.
Bad Exception: I'll just browse for ten minutes before I get started.
This is a lie, and I know it's a lie when I say it to myself. When I start a project this way, I'm doomed to finish it this way, and to probably get barely half of what I wanted to get done finished in the time allotted. Just say no.
The same goes for "I'll put this on just until my creative juices start going," similar to the above. At best you're going to wind up dividing your attention from the word go. Don't do it.
Good Exception: No Rule Works All The Time
Sadly, I am not a robot, and I cannot be useful and productive at all times or even at any time I choose. Regular biological maintenance is of course required, but psychological maintenance is also necessary in order to keep the psyche, the thing I use to do my work, in shape to keep working.
So when I'm sick of being useful and productive, and I see that I've got enough done for the time being, I stop. I go do something else. Hopefully it will be worth my time and won't leave me saying "wow why did I even start doing that?" but I know it won't always be. That's okay, what matters is getting back to work when I feel I have to. And I know that if I push myself to produce 100% quality at 100% speed for 100% of my schedule, I would wind up with maybe 33% quality at probably 17% speed for maybe the first 50% of my schedule, then get nothing at all, because I don't have 300% of me to give to any project, ever. Batman has no limits, but if I don't keep mine in mind, I wind up getting nothing done.
Bad Exception: I've Finished My To-Do List And Have Extra Time And Am Not Tired, Time to Goof Off
Not all, maybe not most, but a good amount of the work I've produced that I've been pleased with has been made during a time at which I could have already been done for the day but decided to keep going because I was in a good and productive mood.
When I'm done with everything I MUST do, and still have energy to do the things I CAN do if I WANT to do them, this is one of the best times of my day, and one that rarely comes around, as I'm usually doing everything I can to finish what I don't want to work on but must.
So when I'm rolling, and feel like I can do almost anything I want, that's when I try to get myself to keep going, to pick something else from my list of projects or start something completely new.
Distractions and entertainment are a 100% necessary part of life, especially a creative life. But they're a poor substitute for the satisfaction of getting something done, and doing it right because you gave it your full interest, put all your brains and your heart and made it part of your story.
So even when you're doing something that doesn't feel important to you, pretend like it is, and you might be surprised to find a way of seeing it that is important after all.
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