Yeah, ok, maybe not so much with the truthiness; I haven't actually started reading it. My prediction: it will be bloated and crappy in a lot of ways, but probably a decent story; Harry lives and will make babies with Ginny; Snape dies; blah blah whatever. I'll start reading soon.
Something that's more on my mind, though, is the process of Getting my Shit Together. I (like everyone) have a lot of Stuff to do: work, domestic stuff, creative stuff, magazine stuff, and so on - just overwhelming piles of Stuff. For the past few months, I've been methodically working on getting it all together. I've been reading a lot of productivity books and blogs, experimenting with systems, and it's slowly starting to come together. It seems like I can only focus on one area at a time: if I'm focused on deep-cleaning the house, for example, I can't really concentrate on writing a novel.
But the good thing is that once an area gets to a certain level of togetherness, it seems to almost maintain itself. Once I get the house in good shape, for example, it only takes a few minutes a day to keep it clean; once my slush pile is under control, it only takes half an hour or so to deal with the newest slush.
It takes a lot of work to get to that point, and I still have a lot of work to do to get everything together. But it's worth it.
Currently I'm using Remember the Milk to keep track of my Lists; it's great, and free. The most useful feature to me, right now, is that I can save a search that looks across all my lists, and pulls out the ones that meet particular criteria - like everything due today. So I can manipulate the due dates and priorities and so on until I get one short clear list of the essential things I need to do, instead of being overwhelmed by lists of hundreds of things. So if you're looking for a web-based to-do list, check it out. I'm a big fan.
Feel free to speak up in the comments. What works for you, in terms of productivity? What challenges are you facing?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Productivity? I no understand your monkey-moon language.
I struggle to be consistently productive. My motto used to be "A clean house is a sign of a wasted life," but then my house started looking like a meth lab, which was not so relaxing as one might think.
I think it has to be something similar to what you're doing that works for me. One thing at a time, and then keep it up. It's the keeping it up that I'm working on at the moment.
Post a Comment