Productivity

After my thoughts on Saturday, I gathered the ideas my mind had been quietly collecting about what my productivity problems were and what I thought I could do about them. I wrote them in my offline journal and present them to you here, revised a little for public presentation:

Okay, so I need to get more focused.

So how do I do it?

1. Unsubscribe from all my RSS feeds except my friends, podcasts, and webcomics. Reading all those little things takes a lot of time that I could be spending working. Everything that is spent on one thing is time taken from something else! When I subscribe to feeds, my purpose is to keep up with what's going on in those subject areas. The purpose of that is mostly to have things to talk about with people. I think the real purpose ends up being simply to fill my mind with more and more interesting things.

   Those are decent goals, but they're really unnecessary. If I need to find out about a subject, I can just research it. I don't need to keep up with it all the time through a regularly updating source. And the benefits aren't worth the cost of not getting projects done that I care about more.

   So unsubscribing from everything feels somewhat uncomfortable, like I'm giving up too much, but I was living just fine without them before I subscribed.

2. Multitask less. I think that when I'm doing more than one thing at once, it increases the time it takes to do the main task by three. This is not good. I need to toughen up my mind so that I can endure the boredom and difficulty of work. I need to turn off IM, close Google, and work. I need to say no to my whims and write them down to return to them later.

3. Give myself permission to do half a task. Otherwise, I'll wait till an unknown time in the future when I have enough time to do the whole task. So think of my work as happening in 5 or 15 minute chunks when I feel busy. This has been working well for blogging this week. Amazingly well.

4. Do my work in large chunks when possible. I get bogged down looking at how much farther I have to go on a task, but I sometimes can make a lot of progress in a short amount of time. I need to observe how this happens. It happened tonight [Saturday] with An Ordinary Day with Jesus. I finished the last three lessons, one of which was rather long, plus some of the back matter. Maybe it was because it was the final stretch, or it might have been the time of day (specifically, night—sorry, people who think morning is the only time of day God declared good, night is just the best time for my mind; deal with it).

5. Avoid delays. I often crave large chunks of time for my projects. This would happen if I would leave work on time, get home quickly, and get to work right when I finish dinner, or perhaps work during dinner. I should do this rather than having to work late because my schedule got thrown off earlier in the day, dawdling on the computer after work, doing errands after work that I could put off till the weekend, and leaping onto IM and the web after dinner. Everything I say yes to is a no to something else! Similarly, a no to what is immediate may be a yes to what is more important.

6. Write before reading. My first impulse is usually to research, but often (a) I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, and sharpening my question would focus my research; or (b) I already know what I'm trying to find out, but I needlessly feel dependent on other people's input or I feel too lazy to write. Before I wrote this I began looking for information on productivity, but I realized that I already had a lot of ideas in my mind for what my problems were and what I needed to do differently.

7. Plan before implementing. This is especially important in programming, and I am already trying to put it into practice there. I still need more practice. Planning is also important for other tasks, though I tend to discount it for research. At some point I want to learn (or create first!) tools for planning.

8. While researching or writing, eliminate excess. I would like to be able to work on autopilot, but really my mind has to always be working while I'm reading or writing. In order to take effective notes, for example, I have to know exactly what kind of information I'm looking for and actively ignore everything else, as in, acknowledge it and pass it over on purpose. And if the author is too wordy, I have to rewrite his points so my notes don't sprawl and I don't quote the whole work. I just have to make sure my rewriting is reworded enough so that it isn't a quote, or I have to make it clear that it's almost a quote so I can further rewrite it later. I need to come up with my semi-mechanical paraphrasing method.

   The same may go for writing. I tend to write somewhat stream of consciousness, but I think there's something to be said for boiling my thoughts down to their unnuanced essence and just recording that for time's sake. I'm not sure though. I might reserve that technique for only certain occasions, since I think recording the whole thought process and all the nuances is so valuable. What brought this paragraph on was mostly that I was thinking today about how reading takes so long because authors are often so wordy when it really isn't necessary.

9. Don't research aimlessly. This is sort of the flip side of 6 and a corollary to 7, 8, and maybe 5. I research a topic looking for more information that will be useful. But I don't know what I'm looking for exactly, and in my present-immersed mind, anything that seems interesting feels important, so my searching could go on forever. I need ways to limit this, and maybe simply not searching is the best way to start. But also I need to cultivate the habit and skill of evaluating my searches as I go. I need to be present to what I'm doing and not simply do it.

This morning I was catching up on my RSS feeds, and it led me to a thread on TheologyWeb about whether Catholicism or Orthodoxy was the way to go. I skimmed the first page or so, partly because the responses weren't very serious, partly because I was just trying to get through everything, and partly because I was only vaguely interested in the topic, but it got me thinking about epistemology. I asked myself what I would need to assume in order to believe that Catholicism or Orthodoxy was the truth. I have no idea, of course, but the important thing is that it defined a research question for me. I do this constantly. It also led me to think about how I go about thinking in general. It's something I want to write about at some point—introspection, defining research questions, backing up from one question to ask others that lie behind it, et cetera.

Later in my feed reading I ran across some discussion of the upcoming ESV Study Bible. Often when I read about the ESV, I like to look for its critics, because I find the breathless gushing of its fans to be silly. This time I found something from Iyov, a blog I hadn't seen before. And whenever I read debates about the ESV, I usually see comments by Suzanne McCarthy, who posts at the Better Bibles blog. And she is usually talking about inclusive language and gender roles. She sometimes seems rather passionate about it. Today I learned that the reason this is such an important issue to her is that she grew up in a complementarian church that took the idea of submission to extremes.

The question of gender roles in the Bible is one of those issues on my long list that I plan to study one day when I have time, but I'm not emotionally invested in it because it hasn't touched my life in a personal way. Today as usual I only glanced at Suzanne's posts and the responses to her because they usually deal with technical details that I won't feel like deciphering until I seriously study the topic.

Instead I thought about the fact that people devote so much time to such specific issues. Given the fact that I had just been pondering how to decide between two of the major Christian traditions, asking whether women should be allowed to speak in church seems like getting ahead of ourselves. Now, specialization is important. Research in any field involves gathering information from many different sources on many different issues, so we need scholars to follow their interests and ask all the obscure little questions that no one else cares about ... until those questions happen to relate to their own. So Suzanne should continue to investigate the questions that drive her.

But there are soooo many of these issues, and everything requires a debate. Nothing worth knowing is cut and dried. And everything takes so much time to learn and deliberate about. If this is true for fundamental topics like God's existence that are needed for deciding on other issues, like (in my opinion) whether personhood begins at conception, how can anyone hope to get anywhere? I concluded that everyone has to choose their battles and make a lot of big assumptions to cover the rest.

The battles I prefer mostly have to do with those fundamental questions, which leaves me less time to deal with the everyday life questions that those answers are meant to make possible, but maybe my answers, if I find any, can help other people with those other questions. Of course, no one has universally settled any of those fundamental questions so far, so I don't expect to, but maybe I can at least hope to gather better information and arguments for grounding the conclusions that I and those who agree with me decide to adopt.

What this tells me is that I have a lot of work to do, and I am wasting time in many ways, most immediately by reading all these RSS feeds, which give me interesting things to think about but which spread out my attention and take it away from my own core questions, when I should be spending time sharpening those questions and carrying out specific and diligent investigations of them.

I don't know how I will do it, with my scattered and work-intolerant mind, but I must find a way.