111–120 of 188 posts
I find myself doing this a couple dozen times a day.
I’ve always have wanted a clean project area on my computer, never managed it though. I try to keep a space for organization (slack, jira, whatever) and another for the ide, for example. Start working, and pretty soon I need to check an old pr on GitHub, and see it side to side with the ide, next someone sends a link in slack that opens a chrome window which is a doc with links that go into tabs. Hold, I have to hop…
I mean that's the easiest thing for me. mkdir NewProject cd NewProject Nice clean work area. Cleaning my real desk is much more difficult.
A thing which happens to me very often: I realize I'm experiencing a very real visceral discomfort nagging at me in the back of my mind. It happens because I will have ctrl+c'd something several minutes ago. My mind subconsciously "holds" onto the info that I have text copied in my clipboard. It's only when I ctrl+v it and consciously discard it does the nagging go away. I have no idea why it happens or if others exp…
A thing which happens to me very often: I realize I'm experiencing a very real visceral discomfort nagging at me in the back of my mind. It happens because I will have ctrl+c'd something several minutes ago. My mind subconsciously "holds" onto the info that I have text copied in my clipboard. It's only when I ctrl+v it and consciously discard it does the nagging go away. I have no idea why it happens or if others exp…
I've worked in the software industry for just over twenty years now. In my experience basically without question the most productive people I have known have had the messiest most chaotic setups online and offline. Hundreds of windows open, more icons on their desktop than it can display. I worked with an older gentleman for the last decade until recent layoffs who had worked on Oregon Trail for MECC. Single most pro…
Hear hear! I maintain it’s because productive people know how to focus on what matters, to cut through the noise, and it’s not just by carefully thinking things through (though that’s an important skill too). It’s partly because they “just don’t see” the noise - if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or he…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My recently achieved overriding goal took 32 years to accomplish! i worked on it as a side project all that time and it took me places i never expected. Very happy. I recommend being less ambitious! Or be smarter than me! Now my major goal is to complete the first tools in that area. it’s still challenging but I think the first version will have only taken 12 months. There is just a lot of newly settled stuff that I…
Does that mean you sat down every work day for 32 years and wrote the same thing on the top of your notepad? I appreciate the consistency but it looks like you could've gotten it inscribed on a plaque at that point :)
I did write the goal down a lot, on working notes, and put it on my fridge, my whiteboard, my pin board, along with next steps and lists of tasks for each.
It was too hard to work on one next step, because there was so much I didn’t know, and it was impossible to know which step was going to cave in first.
That’s when I learned to clear my desk, whenever work hit a wall, and rewrite the goals and steps. To completely reset my mind so I could move forward in a clear alternate direction without pause.
Later I noticed doing that reset every morning helped even more.
I thought a lot about Don Quixote as time went by. I dreamt an impossible dream. Under a star. And then, one day, I got in!
Why does a personal blog need a comically large cookie spam popup?
It does bizarrely use two Google Fonts. Stop using Google fonts people. These aren't even good fonts.
Work surfaces are empty, unless work is in progress. Storage areas are for storage, don't mix. Consider access frequency and where you would look for it first, when choosing where to store items. When seeing something out of place while everything else is put away, it's a nice trigger and motivation for cleaning / fixing / organising. Otherwise I turn passive.
This applies to both starting projects, physical items / surfaces, digital spaces, inboxes and de-facto task lists of various types.
However, it sometimes feels almost like a compulsion, a way to procrastinate. "I cannot start unless all of is clean". Just looking for a sense control to manage the stress I may feel about a task or a situation.
For me it is hard to not think of an object (physical or virtual) when it is in front of you, so I need to keep my line of sight empty and only "see" the items I need to work on, or are otherwise immediately relevant. Depending on stress level this "need" may go deeper and I "want" to empty the other spaces as well, even the previous steps of the current project that I'm working on.
Is this making me less effective in messy environments or does the general stress reduction and focus help compensate for this?
Also, this approach doesn't seem to be as universally good as the article seems to express. Knowing a few people with diagnosed ADHD, I've understood that they also may have a different sense of object permanence.
For them, it may be hard to think of an object / item unless it is in front of them, so keeping all the "relevant" items at hand and in the line of sight is useful. Otherwise they may have trouble getting into the space mentally. Like people who tend to buy too much of a same item because they've forgotten they have a bunch in the cupboard.
In the same vein, at work I've also have had trouble getting other people to agree with having focused lists in our task system. For example, showing only the new items when we need to triage new things, or having a way to isolate (a specific status step) for items that got pushed back from the development to analysis and will need to be clarified.
Instead, they seem to prefer having longer lists to maintain a "full view" of what's going on. At the same time I see that some then do predictably get distracted and / or need to scan through the same items each time because they are in the same list. Not sure how to best deal with that so I've opted for isolation for now. I have my own filtered views and during the relevant meetings I bring them up so they can find them in their bigger lists manually. Perhaps they have a lot better mental filters than I do.
The balance could be to somehow start empty, but allow for the "mess" of relevant items during the project and periodically prune the old stuff without thinking too much how to deal with the in-progress things as they are volatile anyway.