Make The Coffee

Last month was possible the worst in a long time for productivity for me at least in my interpretation. I feel like I got nothing done, though I’m sure I did, my mental todo list always seemed longer at the end of the day than it was in the beginning and even though I felt swamped and like I was working all day long I didn’t feel the accomplishment of crossing much off that list. I decided that for July I’m going to take a close look at that and see what I can do about how I’m running my day, what order and sequence I’m doing things and where I’m putting priority in order to help me feel like I’m getting more of what I want to do done. A few tricks I plan to use:

1. Making a todo list the night before, so when a day starts I already know what I want to do rather than waiting for others to distract me.
2. No phone at home. My phone is a major distraction and so I’m shelving it when I get home – if I’m doing work then I’m in front of my laptop or iPad, I don’t need my phone to me ever present as well.
3. Notes. I’ve been working hard to take better notes, but now I have notes spread through several different notebooks. I picked up a Livescribe 3 pen to try to keep my notes better sorted and archived.
4. Tracking. I have clear goals of how often I want to do X a month and I’m using an app to keep a better eye on my progress.

We’ll see how this goes. Now for coffee.

From time to time my friend Warren has good ideas and recently he set up a secretish blog that isn’t linked from all his other stuff with the purpose of giving him some place to write a little something every day and just help keep things flowing. A while back when I was doing the 750 words thing I found that the motivation to check that off the list every day was powerful and I was much more creative after writing it but then I missed a day and blew the streak and it was depressing and I never went back. I tried a few other times to get a habit going to various degrees of success so I thought I’d follow Warren’s lead here and set this up, don’t tell anyone and then just write some shit. Since I’m not linking to it from anywhere I don’t know who will find it or if I’ll cave and just tell people at some point but in the meantime I’m just going to use it to write a little stream of consciousness every day and hope it helps. Fingers crossed.