Organization
24/11/09 00:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI'm the wrong person to write a post about organization. Especially right now when my bed is surrounded by ARCs. (I opened the box upside down!)
But I have come to the conclusion that I absolutely must do something about the way I manage my time if I'm going to finish everything that I need to finish.
-Filters on my e-mail. I get an incredible amount of stuff from PubLib, a decreasing amount of which is useful, and child_lit, which generally has a good signal-to-noise ratio. But I need to tear myself away from the Pavlovian "ding" of my e-mail every five minutes, so I've started sending child_lit and PubLib straight to be archived. I can still check them a couple times a day when I'm at the reference desk, but NOT when I'm writing, and it forces me to be a little stricter in what I read and what I skip.
-(10+2)*5. This is a system where, over an hour, you work for ten minutes, take a two-minute break, and repeat five times. I have a timer set up on my iPod Touch and my computer to help me with this. I haven't mastered the art of keeping my breaks to ten minutes. Oh well.
Ten minutes is not a lot for writing. Sometimes my timer goes off and I've written three sentences. But it does help keep me focused if I see the timer at 5:00 or 3:00 and I need to accomplish SOMETHING with my ten minutes. The down side of that focus is that it can turn into a panic that overrides listening to what actually ought to happen next. Sometimes you really do need to spend ten minutes staring into space and finding the right thing for that character to say.
-Getting Things Done. I've been trying to implement GTD on and off since I was in grad school. It bundles together a lot of useful concepts with some things that don't work so well. I like the concept of "contexts"-- having a separate list of things that need doing when you're at the computer, when you're running errands, when you're at work, etc. The classic example is the problem of toilet paper. You don't think, "Oh, I need toilet paper!" at the grocery store. You think, "Oh, I need toilet paper!" when you're in the bathroom. So you need to take that awareness and, as soon as it gets in your head, immediately write it down in your Errands context, or your Grocery context, which you look at when you're in the grocery store.
And GTD is good at is projects that can be broken down into many steps.
GTD is not so good at continuous or recurring tasks. Like, writing a novel. Is "write chapter 13" a discrete task from "write chapter 14"? Not really. I might have to stop between them and plan out what's going to happen next, but I might just as easily do that in the middle of chapter 13. I can set a goal for myself of 1300 words, perhaps, but there's nothing that makes word 1301 different from word 1300.
It could be that GTD works best for organizing the small, discrete tasks in life so that you can set aside hours at a time for working on the big projects, and time flowing around those for habitual routines. But GTD is optimized for corporate work and management work, and maybe there are some things it just doesn't do so well. Anyway, I'm trying it again and hoping to stay on it a little better this time, but I'll see how that works out.
But I have come to the conclusion that I absolutely must do something about the way I manage my time if I'm going to finish everything that I need to finish.
-Filters on my e-mail. I get an incredible amount of stuff from PubLib, a decreasing amount of which is useful, and child_lit, which generally has a good signal-to-noise ratio. But I need to tear myself away from the Pavlovian "ding" of my e-mail every five minutes, so I've started sending child_lit and PubLib straight to be archived. I can still check them a couple times a day when I'm at the reference desk, but NOT when I'm writing, and it forces me to be a little stricter in what I read and what I skip.
-(10+2)*5. This is a system where, over an hour, you work for ten minutes, take a two-minute break, and repeat five times. I have a timer set up on my iPod Touch and my computer to help me with this. I haven't mastered the art of keeping my breaks to ten minutes. Oh well.
Ten minutes is not a lot for writing. Sometimes my timer goes off and I've written three sentences. But it does help keep me focused if I see the timer at 5:00 or 3:00 and I need to accomplish SOMETHING with my ten minutes. The down side of that focus is that it can turn into a panic that overrides listening to what actually ought to happen next. Sometimes you really do need to spend ten minutes staring into space and finding the right thing for that character to say.
-Getting Things Done. I've been trying to implement GTD on and off since I was in grad school. It bundles together a lot of useful concepts with some things that don't work so well. I like the concept of "contexts"-- having a separate list of things that need doing when you're at the computer, when you're running errands, when you're at work, etc. The classic example is the problem of toilet paper. You don't think, "Oh, I need toilet paper!" at the grocery store. You think, "Oh, I need toilet paper!" when you're in the bathroom. So you need to take that awareness and, as soon as it gets in your head, immediately write it down in your Errands context, or your Grocery context, which you look at when you're in the grocery store.
And GTD is good at is projects that can be broken down into many steps.
GTD is not so good at continuous or recurring tasks. Like, writing a novel. Is "write chapter 13" a discrete task from "write chapter 14"? Not really. I might have to stop between them and plan out what's going to happen next, but I might just as easily do that in the middle of chapter 13. I can set a goal for myself of 1300 words, perhaps, but there's nothing that makes word 1301 different from word 1300.
It could be that GTD works best for organizing the small, discrete tasks in life so that you can set aside hours at a time for working on the big projects, and time flowing around those for habitual routines. But GTD is optimized for corporate work and management work, and maybe there are some things it just doesn't do so well. Anyway, I'm trying it again and hoping to stay on it a little better this time, but I'll see how that works out.
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24/11/09 16:49 (UTC)Any ARCs you're excited about?
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24/11/09 17:17 (UTC)(no subject)
24/11/09 19:09 (UTC)Right now I'm having a pretty hard time getting focused, just because my roommate likes to have music or the TV on all the time. I'm used to being able to write in the mornings and evenings, and now I only get the mornings when she's at work, or else whatever I can do in libraries and cafes. I really want to get my advance so I can move out when the lease is up, and I really don't want to get a reputation with my editor as somebody who blows off deadlines, so... obviously it's not actually productive to get panicky, but it's somewhat inevitable.