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Some things just don’t get done

At the end of the day, as I empty my locker and pack my diary, I decide that once I am home I will concentrate on just perhaps one or two broad tasks before I sleep. Usually I have something specific in mind - installing a new hard-drive, learning more about PHP and finishing my coursework have been recurring themes recently. So why do I never get round to them?

By the time I have walked my girlfriend to her Dad’s office, taken the odd picture and walked home, it is often 6PM or later. When I get home I am cold, tired, suffering from iPod-induced deafness and occasionally in a cold sweat. The last thing I want to do is pour over a book the thickness of my clenched fist, operate on my PC or do school work. There is always that niggling little voice in my head telling me that I don’t have to worry, there are hours to go.

The problem is, it is… how can I say… hampering my productivity. So I have devised myself a little ‘Getting Things Done’ system. It seems to be increasingly effective - OK, so I am writing this blog post as I should be either sleeping or exercising, but you can actually see my carpet, I have practiced guitar for a solid hour, been for a jog and tidied out a cupboard.

I want to share this method of organization, which is based largely around a book that I have never read. I will share it sometime next week, after it has been refined and I can confirm its effectiveness.

If you want to join in my little experiment, you will need the following:

• A note book, preferably unruled (I am using a slightly-larger-than-a5 blank-paper textile-bound book-thing from WHSmiths. Choose something without a cardboard spine - i.e. something that won’t fall apart within a week)
• A good pen that you enjoy writing with (avoid cheap, nasty ones - you will resent using them)
• Some mini post-its
• A note block (the kind that you put by the phone to scribble things down, but don’t bother buying a pen for, rendering them totally useless and causing great frustration)
• Tack of your choice (I use UHU white-tack rather than blu-tack because it is more pliable. That and you can get it from Poundland.)

Oh, and be prepared for some GTD geekery.

Update:

You might also want to prepare the following:

• A couple of fleurescent highlighter pens in different colours (not a prerequisite of my GTD system, but they really do seem to have a positive impact… and they’re very pretty)
• Some wall space for sticking notes to (I moved an A1-sized poster onto my ceiling and am using that space currently)

As an irellevant aside, if you’re into this kind of thing you may be interested to know that Partners are selling A1-sized whiteboards at stupid prices - you can get the board itself plus extra hooks and loops for wall-hanging and pens of your choice - black and red FTW - for less than £15.

Multi-tasking is the enemy

Ever sat in your room (or at work, or in a lesson), aware that you have so much work to do, and yet not managed to actually do anything - even though you’ve had three project documents open all evening? If you find, as I have done, that this is a common occurrence then I may have some useful information for you: multi-tasking is not your friend.

I always have several projects on the go. I’m quite a task-orientated person, so to me a project could be finishing an essay for English, or watching a documentary, or eating a Crunch Corner, or trying to shift some of the crap that is invariably threatening to obscure my desk surface.

Each project is important and deserves my full attention. But each project never does have my full attention - consciously or subconsciously, I am sabotaging my own productivity. Sometimes it is terrible - not only am I being lured by minor distractions such as reading my feeds, checking my email every few minutes, MSN or staring gormlessly at my own pictures; sometimes I actually try to do two or three ‘projects’ at once.

For instance, I am constantly fighting against my room - my room wishes to be untidy, disorderly and some sort of post-modern gallery for my unwashed clothes, whilst as I person I wish for my room to be clean, tidy, and reasonably neat (mainly to impress my girlfriend). This is fine when there isn’t a DiDA deadline looming, my Geography study isn’t 3 or 4 months overdue and I have courageously beaten back my PT to the point where the standard of my maths book is ‘acceptable’, but for the remaining 99.8% of the time the battle spills over into my other work.

Multitasking does not get your projects finished. This site has had a pending redesign for 3 months. I need to do my Business coursework. There is preliminary DiDA work to be done. Why are all of them progressing at a pathetic pace? Because I’m trying to do all of them at once, get distracted, and in turn just give up and read blogs and look at pictures.

So, here is what I suggest:

• Focus your energies on one particular task, be it waging war against your rebellious property or getting that report finished;
• Under no circumstances stray to ‘just check your email’, or ‘just put this sock back into its cage’ or ‘just check your MySpace picture comments’;
• Turn off the damn TV - when it is on you will not be able to concentrate, full stop;
• Concentrate on your one project for a sustained period, taking short breaks every 30 or 60 minutes.

Future prospects

It has come to a stage in my life where I am compelled to look at my future and where my life is heading.

The most pressing issue is what to pursue for future education. I can either achieve 5 A*-B grades and return to landau to study ICT, Mathematics and English Language and Literature at A2 (full A-level) and Business at AS (half A-level); go to Derby College (Joseph Wright + Mackworth) to study the same A2 subjects + Photography AS; or take a completely different route.

Subject wise it is a no-brainer - I have a passion for photography and my business teacher is unbelievably unstimulating and inexperienced, and sod’s law suggests that I will have her again if I return for A-Level. However, Landau’s average pass-rate for A-Levels is something like 95%, around 20% higher than Derby College if my sources are correct.

Then there is the desicion of what to do post-college. Further education (uni), gap year, employment? I want to go to university, but don’t know if I can justify the cost and if a degree would be relevant to any career path I might take.

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The Giraffe Analogy

Every once in a while I get really down about relationships, sparked by nothing in particular - perhaps a relic of a past relationship with an untactful and indelicate bitch. Whilst these days these moods only last for a couple of hours (opposed to the couple of days that used to linger for less than a year ago), they are still very annoying and a pain to get out of.

The problem is the ‘downer’ effect, or ‘all that goes up must eventually come down’. After a high point in a relationship, when things return to normal I feel as if the relationship has taken a turn for the worst and fall over myself trying to ‘rectify’ things. Of course, nothing has really gone wrong at all, and I am consciously aware that I must avoid being overly clingy or sounding pathetic.

I attempted to explain this over the phone to my girlfriend earlier whilst trying to avoid sounding too brash. The conversation went something like this:

“No, it’s not you… it’s just… like… well, imagine a line graph…”

“A line of giraffes?”

“No, a line… oh, OK then, a line of giraffes. In this herd of giraffes I’ve acquired, there are normal giraffes that are naturally tall; small giraffes that are still quite big; and tall giraffes that are really, really tall. I’ve got them all standing in a line and you can see how their height changes. The small giraffes represent silly arguments and misunderstandings, and the normal giraffes show what we are normally like. The tall giraffes represent really high points.”

“Would this be easier to explain as a line graph?”

“No, let me finish. Just imagine you can’t see any giraffes further than the one you’re already looking at. Imagine for a while you see nothing but really tall giraffes, and they’re all big and impressive. Now imagine that you suddenly get a normal sized giraffe. It’s a giraffe, so it’s still absolutely huge, but it doesn’t seem quite as impressive as the giraffes you’ve already seen so in your mind it’s a bit of a letdown. Do you get me?”

“Yeah, sort of, but it doesn’t make that much sense - I mean, if I had a herd of giraffes I wouldn’t care what size they were because they’re still giraffes and cool and amazing and I’d be so happy and excited to have the herd of giraffes that even the small ones would impress me.”

I honestly can’t remember the last time I smiled as much as when I heard that.

Henceforth, the process of attacks of illogical paranoia being warded off by a witty girlfriend shall be known as ‘The Giraffe Effect’.

PC World rates MySpace ‘#1 Worst Web Site’

Yes, believe it or not, MySpace - the infamous profile and networking site, which has more than 90 million registered users - has been voted #1 on PC World’s list of 25 worst websites. Yes, believe it or not, I am right behind them. Yes, believe it or not, I know that I am turning myself into naked flamebait for saying this. It just seems like a justified time to vent my frustration.

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