I often find that I’d rather be doing anything other that what I’m doing at the time - even if the task in hand is no more dull than the thing that might distract me.
Halfway through writing that sentence I remembered I had four web design books waiting to join the collection on my desk, and went to the effort of collecting them together, fashioning an extension from an old CD (so the tallest and thinnest one at the end wouldn’t fall down the gap between the wall and my desk) and organise them according to size.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad distraction if I were a compulsive tidier, but I’m not: my desk has two empty beer bottles, a bottle of Lucozade, a glass, mug and dish, loose change, cuff links, two things of deodorant (one is Caroline’s), moisturiser, a checkbook, guitar slide, cotton buds, an envelope (used for notes), a bottle opener and a bag from Music Zone. And this pretty much reflects the rest of my room.
I don’t know whether it’s procrastination or a short attention span.
Either way, I have been making progress by making a few rules (to loosely stick to) and changing the way I do things. These are as follows:
Waste time on something useful.
I think this is the ultimate rule. It might not be the thing you need to get done, but something gets done none the less.
For example, last night I came back from university, knowing full well that I have 30 days to finish my final project and that I should probably work on it. This wasn’t going to happen, but I did end up redesigning a website for a friend - it wasn’t my number one priority, but my portfolio needed some more substance and this task was somewhere down the line.
MySpace will never fit into my list of priorities.
Avoid distraction.
The Internet is both a blessing and a curse. Of course, I wouldn’t study what I study if it didn’t exist, nor would I be writing this blog, but my chances of academic success are hampered by the fact that I have this vast amount of information at my finger tips that I can see calling to me from behind the essay’s window.
I actually found a really cool text editor, Write Room (For OSX), that fills the screen and cuts you off from all the other distractions on the desktop, and for me, it’s really the best way to work.
Use dead time.
I regularly travel fair distances by foot or public transport (it can take me 90 minutes to get to university sometimes) and there are times when I have a break that’s too short to get any ‘proper’ work done. It’s all dead time, and it soon mounts up.
I don’t want to get out my laptop unless I’m at a desk (I’ve tried hacking out some code crouched against a foyer wall - I looked like a prick, I was in people’s way, and it wasn’t very comfortable) and I’m not going to ruin a Moleskine by attempting to write something on a bus only to find it illegible afterwards (the roads are terrible around here).
Instead I tend to plan everything in my head: subject and structure for essays, solutions to development problems, ideas for project features, almost everything I do is planned away from a computer.
I’m sure a lot of people do this to some extent, but most people (students) I know seem to have to get into “work mode”. To get into work mode means picking up a book, or opening up Microsoft Word. This works well for me.
Improve Time Management.
At the moment I’m terrible at this.
I’ve decided to stop cluttering my days with avoidable things: like moving meetings to free time slots on already busy days (this means the occasional white lie, such as: “I can only do eleven-to-one on Tuesday”) and keeping my days off as days off.
This morning, for instance, I had to be somewhere between 9:00 and 11:00, and then I have to go somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00. It’s broken up the day, and leaves me with a chunk of time too short to really get deep into a project before having to get ready to leave again.
From now on I’m doing mornings or not at all.
