Britt's Blog

I have found it helpful to sit down every morning (or the evening before) and pick three things off my to-do list to constitute “Mission Success” for the day.

This is a little bit of jargon stolen from NASA. For example, Mission Success for most of the Mars missions constituted landing on Mars and taking a 360° picture called the Mission Success Panorama. That’s it. Mission Success. Now, after snagging the Mission Success Pan, it’s not like the mission folded up its solar panels and called it a sol. But defining a Mission Success that is attainable is what gets your ass off the launchpad and on the way to Mars, where you can do the cool stuff. Feeling like you have to accomplish tons and tons and tons of stuff to be “successful” for the day is intimidating and stifling, and could result in your spacecraft hanging around at Cape Canaveral in its pyjamas paging through cookbooks and reading Metafilter all day. Or something.

This is an excellent way to finally nail of one of those tasks that you’ve been procrastinating on. Eat a frog¹ first thing in the morning, and by conquering it, you get an ego boost that will turbo-charge your whole day. I often pick tasks according to three themes, like 1) an elephant² that I need to take a nibble out of, 2) an old mosquito³ that I’ve been putting off, and 3) a new to-do that I’m excited about. Or the 1) the oldest task on my list, 2) the next time-sensitive thing that’s due and 3) the easiest task on my list. Or one task from each of my top 3 projects. Or whatever.

You can also adjust to your energy level. If you’re having a bad day, picking three really easy things can get you moving–maybe you feel like doing more when they’re done, or maybe not. But at least you did something.

The three-to-do method isn’t foolproof. Failing to hit Mission Success for the day, especially when you’ve set the bar really low, is demoralizing. Also, if you misjudge and set yourself a really gung-ho mission, you can start to resent the list and not want to cleave to it.

But in conjunction with other strategies, it can keep you on track.

¹Helpful and instructive frog-related aphorisms:

• Eat a frog first thing in the morning, and the worst thing that will happen to you all day will already have happened.
• If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it too long first.
• If you have to eat two frogs, eat the uglier one first.

²Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: One bite at a time.
³I can’t find the original source (and maybe I just perverted the meaning, because Merlin Mann’s mosquitoes sound quite distinct from mine), but a mosquito is a thing on your to-do list that will take you no time at all, but you’re avoiding it for some reason, and it just bugs the heck out of you until you smack it.

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pr0n, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking out loud.

It takes a little book-keeping, but keeping track of how much time I spend on particular projects can help me be sure I’m not obsessing over one project at the expense of others. It is also a motivational tool, and can provide reassurance that I’m “clocking in” an appropriate number of hours.

Time-tracking provides some of the structure that GTD lacks, at least in the sense that I usually have some sort of informal goals, e.g. I want to get a lot done on Project X this week, and overall do around 15 hours of concentrated work. I still have the responsibility to make good choices on the ground, but they are at least better-informed choices.

In grad school, I started using the Printable CEO Concrete Goals Tracker by the excellent David Seah. After a while, I decided that giving point values to different accomplishments was not as important as just marking time. (Probably another academia vs. business thing.)

I made up my own form (sadly, lost when my old iBook bricked) with a long row of squares for each project, with each square subdivided into four smaller squares. A small square is 15 minutes, a complete square is an hour. I’d use one form per week, filling in boxes on each day in a different color. (Note the excellent excuse opportunity to exercise your office-supplies fetish. Multicolor pens are very motivating.)

The fifteen-minute block is a very low barrier to entry, especially if you play the whole “I’ll just work 15 minutes, and then I can quit if I want,” game with yourself. (Thank you, FlyLady.) The desire to rack up some serious boxes can then keep you going in the face of distraction.

Having the information in graphic form makes it easy to assess at a glance how you’re doing, what projects you’re going strong on, and what projects you might be neglecting.

Now, don’t expect to rack up too many hours. You’re only recording hours that you spend concentrating on work… not running around making copies, not chatting with co-workers, not deleting spam. In The Now Habit, Neil Fiore recommends working no more than 20 concentrated hours a week, and no more than 5 hours a day. (I did 30 hours of concentrated work a week for a couple weeks while finishing my thesis, then moved to Wisconsin and promptly fell over with a sinus infection that took me completely out of the game for about three weeks. Learn from my mistakes.)

Time tracking requires, well, keeping track of time. You can set a timer for fifteen minutes, a half hour, or an hour. I like the Stop It! Dashboard widget because the chime is pretty. Another fun way to keep track of time is David Seah’s online Emergent Task Timer which chimes every fifteen minutes to prompt you to click a bubble to indicate what you’re working on. (You can even customize the chime with your own mp3.) If you’d prefer, there’s a printable Emergent Task Timer as well. (Told you that David Seah is awesome).

If this all sounds a little obsessive, well, yeah, it is. But as the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. For me, evaluating how well I’m doing by how I feel about my work can be disastrous. Feeling like I’m not doing well (accurately or not) can easily turn into a spiral of shame as I “try harder,” get stressed, procrastinate, and get nothing done. Tracking time means I don’t have to pressure myself to accomplish a big goal, or do a task perfectly, or even work a huge amount of time—I just have to get my butt in the chair and fill in some boxes, which is pretty easy, by comparison. And having my butt in my chair and filling in boxes leads to my work getting done and me feeling satisfied with what I have accomplished.

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pron, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking out loud. If you are interested, check out the previous post post on how I handle time management during the school year.

One of my strengths is that I’m actually very good at accomplishing smallish, well-defined tasks with finite deadlines. I am almost always prepared for class well in advance, my papers get graded in a more or less timely manner, and in general the basic rhythms of the school year agree with me.

In the summer time, I don’t teach, so all of those reassuringly recurring tasks go *poof* and I am left staring down a number of large, long-term projects like “Prepare for next fall’s classes” or “Write a paper” or “Reduce this dataset.”

One of my weaknesses is that I’m lousy at planning, executing, staying motivated for and persistently working on large projects. (And of course, by “lousy” I mean “probably better than 80% of the population, but less good than I am at other things.”¹)

Organizing these kinds of projects happens to be what Getting Things Done is particularly awesome at. In the GTD system, you have a list of projects with well-defined goals (which I wish I were good at writing), and you review this list weekly to be sure that you’re doing the right thing for each project, and, most importantly, to identify stalled projects and figure out why you’re stuck. Stalled projects are almost always stuck on a poorly-conceived or abstractly-worded “next action” on a context list somewhere that devours another tiny piece of your soul every time you look on it. Rewrite the offending next action, and you’re golden.

However, another facet of GTD is this notion that you don’t schedule tasks. Instead you have your lists of next actions for each project, and you tackle them according to your context, your energy level, and your priorities as determined by periodic review of the big picture. There’s an almost fetishistic emphasis placed on being flexible about what you work on.

However, as a wise colleague just pointed out to me, GTD was invented for a business context, not for academia. In business, emergencies happen, and conditions and priorities are constantly shifting. Agility is absolutely necessary. But in academia, there is no such thing as an emergency. In the best case, you know for months in advance what you need to do and when it needs to be done by, and even in the worst case, there is no deadline that cannot be negotiated. Every once in a while there is a crisis (genuine, or just in someone’s mind) and you have to drop everything and deal with it, but it’s rare.

So GTD is based on fulfilling a need for flexibility that I don’t have. Worse, one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I’m bad at making good, responsible choices on the fly. (As Steve Pavlina says in this post on getting up right away when your alarm goes off, your sleepy self when you are in bed in the morning is not your best coach for becoming an early riser. Neither is my self sitting at my desk at 2:15 in the afternoon my best coach for being productive. Web-surfing champion, perhaps, but not productivity coach.) I’m much better at following routines, building habits, and basically using inflexibility and inertia to my advantage.

I have experimented with a few ways to try to cope with my inability to make excellent priority-based decisions moment-to-moment in a GTD-esque, mind-like-water manner, and in the following post(s), you can find some of the methods I have found helpful, and lots of links to the sources that inspired them. All of these create planning and structure that is absent in GTD. This is not intended to be a how-to for achieving perfect productivity. It’s not even a description of how I’m going to organize my time. As I mentioned, I’m mostly just thinking out loud in these posts, and part of the purpose of writing them is trying to decide what I am going to do to stay focused this summer.

Am I still on the quest for the perfect system? Not so much, any more. What I do want to do this summer is experiment with different methods, not to build the perfect, stress-free life, but in order to work with (not against) my strengths and weaknesses and keep making progress on my important projects.

¹Fact: I have a Ph-freaking-D (really, the “freaking” is on my diploma²), which means I cannot suck totally at long-term projects. Fact: It took me 10 years to get it, which means I suck more at long-term projects than most other people with PhDs. Fact: 1% of Americans 25 and older have a doctorate, so even if I am the suckiest long-term-project person with a PhD, I probably don’t suck at long-term projects all that bad, even considering that not everyone who is good at long-term-projects has a PhD.

²No, not really.³

³You know who else really liked nested footnotes? David Foster Wallace. And I say “liked” rather than “likes” because he offed himself. So it’s probably not a good idea to keep this up.⁴

⁴But, anyway, the point is that completing long-term projects without having a boss telling you what to do and holding you accountable for deadlines is hard and I should stop beating myself up over not finding it easy. All the same, if you know any good resources for learning how to plan an manage a project that might be useful for a person who works alone, not managing other people, especially with an academic bent, let me know.

I’m going to do a few posts on productivity. If you’re not interested in the lifehack-pron, feel free to skip. Mainly this is just me thinking (typing?) out loud.

How should you keep track of the things you need to do? There is no one right answer. It will vary from person to person, of course, but I find that I need different ways of tracking my to-dos during the school year than during the summer. And I’ve even been using different tracking of to-dos for different aspects of my work during the school year.

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I’ve be wrestling with this for a while, and I think I’ve finally come to some kind of a provisional understanding—or maybe my sense of crisis has just faded to a tolerable background uneasiness.

I freaked out at the beginning of this summer when I realized that I was attacking all the things about my life that I am unhappy about by developing systems and strategies, but holy crap, what am I going to do when things don’t work? I mean that on the individual level: what if I try five different strategies for getting my grading done in a timely manner, and none of them work? What then? HUH? And I also mean that on a collective level: I have improved several things about myself and my life by being disciplined and systematic. I have taken up exercise, and I feel healthier. I have lost weight, and my blood pressure is lower. I have become more organized, and I spend less time panicking because I can’t find things. I manage my time better and don’t flake and accidentally blow off meetings or important tasks as often. All good things. But what floored me is that I am improving my life in many small, practical ways… but I am really growing in a larger sense?

There was a panicky moment there when I wondered if I was going to have to Get Religion or sell all of my possessions and buy a goat farm or maybe just run away and hitchhike though South America. (Luckily, no rash decisions were made.)

Having pondered for a while, I think the real question I’m grappling with is: What do I want or expect to be the ultimate outcome of all these strategies and systems?

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I’ve decided that giving myself choices is bad. Choices lead to the possibility of making the wrong choice.

Habit is good. Routine is good. Doing the thing I ought to be doing, at the same time, every day, whether I feel like it or not, is the way to get that thing done.

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43 Folders has an interesting post titled Death and Underachievement, which is about reassessing how hard you are trying to “achieve.”

This is resonating with a bunch of stuff I have been reading and thinking about lately.

Yoga is supposed to be all about loving kindness and acceptance of the self, and I actually do try to embrace that philosophy, but, really, that just ain’t my groove. I’m a Type-A yoga personality. I am taking the time and paying the money to take yoga and I am going to achieve (there’s that word!) maximum benefit through maximum effort, damnit! I put a lot of pressure on myself to strive for perfect form and to stretch right to the edge of my envelope. Otherwise, I’m basically wasting money and time (mine and my teacher’s—though I’m sure Melinda would totally freak out, in a calm, supportive, and yogic way, over the notion that I was wasting her time!)

But sometimes when we get to one of my least favorite poses, I just think, “Oh, well, I’m going to totally suck at this.” Then, surprisingly, I am able to stretch much, much further than I think I can. Because I’ve given up, because I’m not pressuring myself to achieve, I can relax and actually achieve more that if I had tried my hardest.

It’s a general principle. You need to put a little bit of pressure on yourself to motivate yourself to get working, but it’s very easy to go beyond that and try so hard that you stress yourself out and make yourself less efficient. And you can even go beyond that point, and put so much pressure on yourself that you are paralyzed by fear of failure–or fear of success—and procrastinate so you don’t get anything done.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the learning curve, lately, too, and giving yourself permission to be less than perfect. This has two components, it seems: not trying to over-prepare and make everything perfect ahead of time, and also learning from your mistakes without feeling the need to flagellate yourself for an eternity.

As I prepare for the new semester, I want to plan new things, but I’m trying to give myself permission to screw up. I’m trying to resist the urge to plan everything out in minute detail, to try to think out every possible contingency, to try to make it all perfect the very first time I try it. I’ve realized that most of the innovations that worked best for me in the past were not the ones that I obsessed over for months and months. Indeed, some of those details that I fixed on and insisted on honing to perfection were, in the end, mistakes, and turned into painful thorns in my side. Contrarywise, I often had spectacular success with the things that I just tried on a whim, and now, after developing them further, I use them extensively. Sure, some of the stuff I tried on a whim went down in spectacular flames, but hey, that’s life. I just sifted the ashes for whatever was worth keeping, graded leniently, and stumbled onward.

I have to keep in mind that students (and faculty, for that matter) are resilient creatures, and if I, or they, or we screw up on one point, that doesn’t mean that we will have learned nothing. I have to remember to give myself—and my classes—credit for the things we learn to do well, and not put all my focus on the few things that don’t go well.

So, inasmuch as I have a New Year’s resolution, I think that’s it: I give myself permission to learn from my mistakes of the past and move on. I give myself permission to be imperfect in the future. I am not going to aim for perfect mastery; I am going to aim for the learning experience.

Grades have been submitted, paperwork has been stowed securely at the back of the file cabinet, and seniors have been marched across a stage in alphabetical order.

I’m suffering from the same syndrome that struck at the beginning of winter break, namely restlessness that makes slacking off almost impossible. I try my best to sit around and do nothing, but the back of my mind starts volunteering stuff I probably ought to be doing, which pretty much defeats the purpose of relaxing. Luckily putting in a day of work at the office seems to scratch the itch, and I can slack off in the evening without feeling compelled to be productive.

For the moment I’m going with it. I mean, I feel like working. No sense in forcing myself to slack off, ’cause I suppose I’ll get fed up with working and feel like slacking off later.

To be honest, I’m apprehensive that having all these vast stretches of time to work on a huge scary projects (figure out how to get the 22-inch working again, figure out how to build an observatory, write an article out of my thesis, write labs for Physics 101) is going to kick me back into überprocrastination mode.

I’ve tried breaking up my summer, using on various events as artificial starting points and deadlines, just to create some kind of structure. I’m using GTD, of course, to keep track of all the things I might possibly be doing, and I’ve been using an unschedule so that I have a realistic idea of how I’m spending my time. That’s basically the system I used for last summer, while finishing my thesis, so I guess it should work. One change I should make compared to last summer is to schedule more time for relaxation and not spend quite as much time with my nose to the grindstone, so I don’t end up collapsing with a catastrophic sinus infection in August. :/

I’m adding the Printable CEO, or more accurately, the editable Excel version so that I can fill in my own concrete goals. I plan to customize these for each week, based on what I hope to accomplish. I did 13 points today. :)

Here’s hoping for a productive summer. I’m trying to stay focused on getting a paper written, but there are a few other things I need to look after, too. I’ve been warned, if you try to do too much with your summer, you’ll accomplish nothing. I have six different projects to work on. Probably not smart. Well, I guess all I can do at the moment is ride the momentum left over from the semester and see how far that takes me.

I’ve just completed my second read-through of GTD, after first reading the book about a year ago.

My main purpose for rereading is that I had fallen out of the habit of the weekly review, never mind the periodic big-picture review one is supposed to do.

In addition to getting my reviewing act together, the main benefit I got out of a second reading was a better understanding of projects—which makes some sense, since a major part of your weekly review is (or should be) a review of the projects list.

Projects in GTD seem to be a concept that a lot of people have some trouble with, and they’re the topic of a lot of discussion on blogs and in forums. As a result of rereading the book and thinking about my implementation and the nature of next actions, think I’ve come to a definition for project that works with my system: It’s a thing I want to accomplish that requires organization beyond a single next action.

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Taking a motivational tip from JP I am going to use the threat of public shame to motivate me to plow through an onerous to-do list.

Here’s the grading I have accumulated:

• Astronomy: Observing Lab, 8/31 [15 min]
• Physics: Lab, Vector Manipulation, 9/11 [1h 15m]
• Astronomy: Indoor Lab, Celestial Sphere, 9/12 [30 min]
• Astronomy Problems, Unit 1-4, 9/14 [1 hour]
• Physics: Projectile Motion Lab, 9/19 [15 min]
• Astronomy: Spectrum Lab, 9/19 [15 min]
• Physics: Problems, Ch 3 & 4, 9/22 [1 hr]
• Physics: Lab, Atwood Machine, 9/25 [30 min]
• Astronomy: Observing Lab, Binary Stars, 9/26 [15 min]
• Astronomy: Problems, Spectra handout, 9/28 [30 min]
• Physics: Problems, Ch 4 & 5, 9/29 [About a million years]
• Astronomy: Article summaries, (various) [30 min]

I thought listing it all out would make it seem more managable.

I was wrong.

Any encouragement would be appreciated. Email me if you need my address so you can send chocolate, caffeinated beverages and/or cheap whiskey to dull the pain. :)