Posts Tagged ‘GTD’

Why Time Management Methods Work

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

I strongly believe that energy levels, focus and productivity are related and come in closely related cycles. I’ve always had weeks I can get done great amounts of work, followed by weeks of procrastination and inactivity.

Now at some point in this cycle, energy levels start to rise, but you are still in the habbit of low output. This will make you you feel guilty of not outputing, while your mind does want to. You are starting to imagine all the work you want to get done and does not seem to come along at all.  This is where time management methods come in. The promise of beating procrastination and the overwhelmed feelings. So you try to follow them and it helps you get your thought in order and get more work done. Up till the point that everything is going well,  you’re on a roll. If you are like me, you have already abandoned the time management method, because it feels more like a chore and everything is moving along without it.

The Productivity Cycle

My feeling is that time management does not actually help you that much,  you just try it at the time that your productivity is already bound to rise up the cycle again.   The real problem comes when your energy levels are dropping again.  First you overcome it by moving to simpler tasks, but slowly procrastination creeps in.  The problem is, you don’t notice it, until it’s to late. At which point you don’t feel like doing much at all, most certainly not some complicated time management method.

I do believe that you can influence the whole cycle, but it’s way outside the scope of time management and has everything to do with your general well-being and the habits that influence it.

Waves of Productivity

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

Another reality is that energy and productivity come in waves.  Although those hyper-productive days feel great,  there is no substitute for steady output if you really want to move forward.  However, I do suspect that those hyper-productive days are probably also the cause of the low-energy weeks that will follow.    It are these low-energy weeks that are plagued with  procrastination (in all sorts and shapes).

I wrote about procrastination before, this time I’ll tell you what I found out doesn’t work:

“I’ll do it tonight” – Although it seems a good idea (and feels good at the time) to fix a time to do a task in the near future, it’s actually the worst idea and it is the essence of procrastination:  postponing things you could and should do right now.
There is an exception:  urgent tasks that come in while you are already really actively working on another task. However, make sure that you commit to it, by telling the other party as well that you WILL do it today.

Other times I try to trick myself in doing something: I tell myself I will do project A after I’ve finished (hard) project B, because B is more important. However, instead of speeding up B, this will usually result in feeling very busy and besides B still moving forward slowly, nothing happens on A either.  So:   if you are not really actively working on B RIGHT NOW, there is no reason not to work on A as well. There is just no way that you are dedicating all your effective time to that single important project, unless you are really close to a deadline.

Getting Things Done: The Pomodoro Way

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

A few days ago I wrote about procrastination and by coincidence I came across an article about changing your working method to embrace the interruptions, instead of trying to find long stretches of concentration (‘the zone’). It is a nice read, however, more importantly in the comment section I came across something that really appealed to me: The Pomodoro Technique.   I had seen it before, but it didn’t jump out to me at that time.

The basic idea is:  work for 25 minutes on a single task, with a timer ticking back the time left  and then take a break. This is augmented by a few other important steps, such as: noting down your distractions, evaluate them only after the 25 minutes are up and crossing of the completed intervals per task.

As I don’t have a proper timer yet, I looked for a software one, that works under Ubuntu as well  and came across:  Focus Booster.   It makes the ticking sound and also very nicely automatically starts your 5 minute break timer after time is up.

I just started using it, so I’ve only done a few of these ‘Pomodoro’ intervals, but I feel very confident that this will actually work as it makes you very aware of the distractions you need to avoid/delay  and the time you have available.  Starting the timer gives a feel of commitment about doing something NOW instead of  in a few minutes. Furthermore, having a timer tick back, give you back a bit of that deadline stress that makes you feel productive, without the disadvantages of real deadlines. And, not unimportant: it feels good to cross of real productive time.

Deadlines Are Killing

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

My whole life I’ve been trained in sticking to deadlines.  School and University is nothing but doing a reasonable amount of work  for an event fixed in time (tests,  reports to hand in, etc)  Which, if you are anything like me,  means  procrastinating until the exact moment it can’t wait any longer an then work very hard.    Procrastination is rewarded:   it gives you more free time  and good results, so by the time  you get to your graduation, it has been perfected to find exactly the minimum amount of time needed to still get good results.

However, this skill gets you nowhere on real projects.  Projects like  your graduation or  developing a new product, where there is no fixed ending and you really want to get done as much as possible, as soon as possible.  ( I can probably make a todo list that fills the rest of my lifetime )  Of course there is the fun/interesting stuff that will never get you stuck, however every project (even the most fun ones)  have those tasks that you just need to get done. Not being able to do so in a timely manner is very frustrating.

The first obvious way to try and fix  this, is to create artificial deadlines, to get back that feel of urgency. However, deadlines that you set yourself don’t work, I’m just way to much aware how arbitrary they are.

Furthermore, on real projects, the amount of work is not known in advance. So there is no way to determine when to start to finish ‘just in time’. On the other hand lots of stuff you delay, might take far less time than you expected.  (You actually spend more time thinking about how much time it is going to take)

Procrastination is also closely related to getting ‘into the zone’ (Read: Joel Spolsky on that topic), but to be fair,  there are also lots and lots of activity that do not require any ‘zone’ at all. So, I feel a strong urge to  ‘solve’ this productivity mystery.   One of the obvious choices is reading about the ‘getting things done’  method. However I’ve never succeeded in making it work for me:  Writing everything down in a system, makes it even more overwhelming then just managing it in my head, as my brains are a lot better capable in hiding the ‘someday/unimportant’ stuff that I come up with.

I’m still in doubt though whether this is not just your brain telling you that there is only a fixed amount of productive time and the idle time in between is just needed to solve complex problems. However, there are a few things I did find, that do help:

  • Committing to a task, by telling someone that you will do it: ‘right now’.  (Not some time in the near feature, really: NOW)
  • Do another task instead, that you feel really passionate and confident about, to get going
  • Split up your tasks into such small subtasks that it’s impossible to not finish it (So every time you do any work, you actually finish something, instead of going from   ‘busy’ to ‘still busy’)
  • Work together on a project,  you can keep each other going  ( I believe that is one of the biggest arguments in favor of pair programming)

Are you a procrastinator as well?  And what do you do about it?