A new micro practice: every night as the plates spin down, I write myself a Mac OS sticky note. When I wake up in the morning, this sticky note is waiting for me.
The rule is that I write down everything I need to do that day into a sticky note, and it has to fit without scrolling. Since 70-75 words fit into my note, that’s about 3½ twitters, or 2 del.icio.us descriptions.
That actually turns out to be a lot of space for describing what needs to happen. More than enough. Today my note only has one thing to do on it! But it’s a hard thing, one that I’ve been putting off for some time, and one that’ll soak up all the time I dump on it.
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Hiveminder is overwhelming before noon. I keep individual project logs, but I don’t want to filter through all that stuff in the morning.
But, in the morning, I can read a few sentences and maybe an encouraging slogan.
And maybe the few sentences, or the encouraging slogan, will energize me enough to open up Hiveminder and the project logs and start typing.
There is a quiet desperation to this practice. Hopefully it’s just something I’m using to claw my way through the graduate degree — hopefully in a month, I’ll be able to open up my laptop and confront the work I need to do without this layer of indirection.
Ben Parzybok | 21-Mar-07 at 12:02 pm | Permalink
I like this. I use http://rememberthemilk.com to store todos - it’s a great system, but it gets so clogged with to-dos outside of scope or things that I’m actively avoiding that I end up adding to it and never looking at/crossing off what is on the list.
I still brain dump onto an envelope-back at first sip of coffee. Having something physical — that I can crumple, cross-off, and that eventually winds up under my desk where I’ll find it two weeks later and think, hey! Look at all these things I’ve done! — seems to be the best method for me. On the computer, the lists become long records of all the things I have not done.