Grad School News, Thoughts on Productivity

[sfogarty]

I’ve been playing with free-writing. The last time I made a livejournal post based on some free-writing, it was a bit tangential to the topic of the writing. This is because what I mostly wrote about was school, and I was not in a place to talk about that. So I will do so now

Comments

[megalotta]

I wonder if some of those ideas would work for me. I like the idea of things in a box for which you pull something out randomly. That seems to suit me quite well.
Unfortunatley lists don't work all that well for me. I tend to do much better if I simply pick one thing and work on it endlessly until it's finished. Bouncing from one project to another tends to make me feel like I'm seriously not getting anything worthwhile done. Wonder why that is... hmm...
It was great seeing you when you were visiting here! Hope your semester is fabulous as a result of the changes you've made and are making. *hug*

[sfogarty]

I very much like the box. I actually have three of them: one research box at school, one non-research (administrative, teaching, etc) box at school, one box for home. I do one a day... most days research, wednessday non-research, weekends at home. The specific mechanism is that the tasks in the box are by definition one hour long: I pull out a task, I work on it for an hour, and then I stop. While I am working, I do not check email, answer phone calls, surf the web, whatever. Once the hour is up, I have to take a break for at least a couple minutes: check email, return phone calls, surf the web. While originally this was a way of getting things done (it is still useful for that, I can just put some task in a box and it'll get done eventually), it has also become a kind of excercise of focusing on one things for an hour and not letting myself get distracted or sidetracked or frustrated and giving up. Thus I have kind of structured my work habits around 'work for an hour, take a break'. It kind of ensures some level of focus.