Reminds me a lot of Cal Newport's ideas re: Slow Productivity. He talks a lot about how Context shifts are death for knowledge work and that a lot of offices operate via a "hyper active hive mind" that doesn't allow or value deep work.
I find a timer useful for this. If you use Timery, you get a live activity on your home screen.
I don't care how long a thing takes, and I don't retrospectively analyse the time. The point is that I can only have one timer running: and that's the thing that I'm supposed to be doing.
If I notice I'm doing something else, it serves to bring me back to the task.
And at the end of the day, I do look through the list and see how often the thing I was doing changed. I try to keep that to a minimum, because every change is a context switch.
I've only been doing this for about a week, I'm still working on it, but so far it's been more helpful than not.
I have too many meetings to get anything done. I'll go weeks, or months, without actually doing anything of real value. Eventually it comes to a head and I need to get things done to avoid going crazy. I go on do-not-disturb in our chat app, quit Outlook completely, and turn on a focus mode on my cell phone so people can't even call me. I'll end up working for 8-15 hours straight with no real breaks. I go to the bathroom, but keep my head in the problem, that's about it. I completely forget to eat or do anything else. I get 2 months worth of work done in 1 day.
If meetings were eliminated (or just consolidated into a single planning week), and I cloud just do deep work, I think I could work 2 days per month and be more productive than I am currently working 40+ hours per week.
I always want to send my management graphs like this to show them why having 10 projects running at a time is a bad idea...
The image in the article (here, since the link was broken: https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png) is something I've sent to a boss in the past. He didn't get it.
I feel for you, friend. Maybe you could share the essay "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" by Paul Graham [0]. It's been somewhat helpful when I've shared it with colleagues.
jen729w|1 year ago
I don't care how long a thing takes, and I don't retrospectively analyse the time. The point is that I can only have one timer running: and that's the thing that I'm supposed to be doing.
If I notice I'm doing something else, it serves to bring me back to the task.
And at the end of the day, I do look through the list and see how often the thing I was doing changed. I try to keep that to a minimum, because every change is a context switch.
I've only been doing this for about a week, I'm still working on it, but so far it's been more helpful than not.
al_borland|1 year ago
If meetings were eliminated (or just consolidated into a single planning week), and I cloud just do deep work, I think I could work 2 days per month and be more productive than I am currently working 40+ hours per week.
I always want to send my management graphs like this to show them why having 10 projects running at a time is a bad idea...
https://res.cloudinary.com/jlengstorf/image/upload/f_auto,q_...
...but I know it will be received poorly.
The image in the article (here, since the link was broken: https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png) is something I've sent to a boss in the past. He didn't get it.
Flimm|1 year ago
[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
unknown|1 year ago
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