Productivity

In the interest of greater productivity I am now imposing deadlines on myself. Instead of allowing myself open-ended time periods to take care of a bunch of stuff, I set a date. I will have my online class material done by Friday (possibly tomorrow - Thursday - for studying today was promising), request the quiz that day (it's a file that the prof. sends out), then I'll set a new timeline to take the final. The timeline stuff gets more difficult when it comes to learning new material for class, which is about as open-ended as it gets. It's also frustrating when your day gets away from you. But I figure that imposing such limitations may focus the learning mind.

There's no shortage of personal productivity gurus out there, I'm aware. On impulse I bought Getting Things Done, or "GTD," and I haven't cracked the book yet. And I don't plan to any time soon. I'm peripherally aware of productivity buzzwords such as Parkinson's Law, which is precisely what I'm going for with the deadlines, but I'm not a student of the genre. It would just be a whole bunch of stuff that I would inhale voraciously and do nothing about it.

I like the idea of Parkinson's Law because I hate losing a whole bunch of time unnecessarily. If I can define my goals for a given time I want them done asap, and if this is a tool that can focus the mind, bring it.

I read an article once about calculating your "fudge ratio," where you predict how long you'll take to complete a given task and divide it by how long it ended up taking. If your ratio is close to one then you're a good predictor. You can take it for periods of time over various tasks. If you know that you have a tendency overguess such and such a task by a certain percentage of its time, you plan accordingly. Over time your goal would be to get as close to one as possible. Then if you're a massive nerd you put it all on a spread sheet.

I'm a nerd, but a lazy one. I foresee many unfinished excel files.