New productivity planning plan
Jul. 12th, 2018 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackFor a year and a half I've been trying giving myself specific goals each month. Originally the idea was to take on a specific project I was excited about, but it slowly got diluted as my todo list filled up with overdue chores.
I know some people were surprised I was deliberately taking things on in that well, "but just do what I feel like" has never worked for me: I always used to panic that I'm not doing something else more urgent, or panic that I wasn't taking advantage of a rare opportunity to make significant progress on something I actually enjoyed, and usually ended up freezing up and not doing anything. And not just, not achieving significant projects -- often even not even achieving "reading a book I want to read instead of reading twitter".
The main benefit was getting stuff OFF my mental and actual todo list so I could do *some* things.
I had a few really satisfying months.
But now I'm reviewing the situation and decided to try something else.
I'm going to try to do some creative writing (a short story, a short chapter of a novel, or maybe a different creative project like board game design) in weeks 1 and 3 of the month. And weeks 2 and 4 will be "long-term chores", "day-to-day chores", "relax" or "some other project" depending how I feel.
I think I needed to go through the previous system to reach the point where this might work for me, but I think it makes more sense. I realise what helps me is some confidence that I'm *making progress* specifically. So having ANY time devoted to an ongoing project helps a lot -- in some ways even a tiny amount of time is good because it reassures me I'll achieve something *eventually*.
And hopefully that lets me relax in the other weeks, and do whatever seems appropriate without too much planning.
I was also ruthless at taking long-overdue chores, taking them off my month list, and putting them into a separate "kind of time sensitive but without a specific deadline" section.
Of course, I find myself revising my system every couple of years. In some way, I think a new system just helps by itself because the old system gets stale. But I also think, it is useful in finding what's most useful to me *now*.
I feel like I went a very very long way round to reach the point of being able to achieve steady reliable progress on, well, anything. Maybe because anything less than that didn't work for me at all -- inconsistent progress was basically the same as no progress, since I'd repeatedly lose faith in myself and preemptively give up. But that does mean that I sometimes reach unexpected plateaus of competence I hadn't expected to reach :)
I know some people were surprised I was deliberately taking things on in that well, "but just do what I feel like" has never worked for me: I always used to panic that I'm not doing something else more urgent, or panic that I wasn't taking advantage of a rare opportunity to make significant progress on something I actually enjoyed, and usually ended up freezing up and not doing anything. And not just, not achieving significant projects -- often even not even achieving "reading a book I want to read instead of reading twitter".
The main benefit was getting stuff OFF my mental and actual todo list so I could do *some* things.
I had a few really satisfying months.
But now I'm reviewing the situation and decided to try something else.
I'm going to try to do some creative writing (a short story, a short chapter of a novel, or maybe a different creative project like board game design) in weeks 1 and 3 of the month. And weeks 2 and 4 will be "long-term chores", "day-to-day chores", "relax" or "some other project" depending how I feel.
I think I needed to go through the previous system to reach the point where this might work for me, but I think it makes more sense. I realise what helps me is some confidence that I'm *making progress* specifically. So having ANY time devoted to an ongoing project helps a lot -- in some ways even a tiny amount of time is good because it reassures me I'll achieve something *eventually*.
And hopefully that lets me relax in the other weeks, and do whatever seems appropriate without too much planning.
I was also ruthless at taking long-overdue chores, taking them off my month list, and putting them into a separate "kind of time sensitive but without a specific deadline" section.
Of course, I find myself revising my system every couple of years. In some way, I think a new system just helps by itself because the old system gets stale. But I also think, it is useful in finding what's most useful to me *now*.
I feel like I went a very very long way round to reach the point of being able to achieve steady reliable progress on, well, anything. Maybe because anything less than that didn't work for me at all -- inconsistent progress was basically the same as no progress, since I'd repeatedly lose faith in myself and preemptively give up. But that does mean that I sometimes reach unexpected plateaus of competence I hadn't expected to reach :)