Burning Ones

So, I have recently come up against the brutal realization that I do not have any natural focussing ability. I am naturally a scatter-brained and dilluted individual. This really hampers my ability to get anything done. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that as I go about doing anything my brain is constantly flitting around to other things. I don’t think this is necessarily all bad. I appreciate the way God has made me and I believe that it does have some purpose. But when I need to get something done, I have to have a strategy. Over a few articles I’m going to attempt to document the strategy that I have taken up in the name of accomplishing the tasks I have set before me. You’re reading part 1: Haiku Productivity.

Haiku Productivity

What is Haiku Productivity? It’s first and foremost a fantastic little idea that I read about over on Zen Habits (via Life Hacker). A Haiku, of course, is a poem that forces extreme brevity upon the author and can produce some of the most charged words possible because, quite literally, every syllable counts. The basic idea, applied to productivity, is to “intentionally bind ourselves” to doing only a small number of things.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we can only focus on a small number of things at a time before our activity degrades to mindlessness. It’s probably less than you think it is, too. The strategy, then, is to deliberately reduce the number of things that we are doing at any given time in order to do the things we are doing better and with greater effect. I’m taking this idea and running with it in the following ways.

Divide My Life Into Areas

First, I have divided my life into rough areas. It’s kind of funny because when I was a bit younger and even now I fiercely opposed compartmentalization. Here I am doing just that. However, I’m not compartmentalizing the important things so much as I am attempting to figure out what exactly it is that is important to me.

I have divided my life into areas such as God, Friends, Family, Games, Computers, Reading, etc. Within each area I have listed subjects that I want to be focussing on. For instance, in Family I have maintaining relationships as one of my goals. In God I have being discipled and personal prayer. In games I have lists of all of the games I would like to play on each system I have access to that I already have (coincidentally, this has stopped my impulse to buy new games because I have about 100 games that I want to play that I already own!).

2 Focus Subjects per Area

Second, I have structured things so that I cannot divide my focus amongst too many subjects within a given area of my life. The rule is: Focus on no more than 2 subjects in any one area at a time. This is because I don’t believe I can adequately address anything if I’m focusing on any more than one other subject within that particular area. What that translates into in the Computer area is that I am only focussing on Web Application Architecture and Design Patterns. Other areas are the same.

2 Areas a Day

Third, I allow myself to focus on no more than 2 areas a day. For instance, on Wednesday my focus is Computers and Reading. I attempt to focus my free time for that whole day on just those subjects. The rule from above still applies to this; what that means is that in any given day I am at most focussed on 4 total subjects, with the most at a single time of 2.

See Subjects through to completion

And last, for each area of focus I must complete the subject before I am allowed to move on to the next. In other words, unless something drastic has come up that forces me to change one of my subjects, I see that subject through to it’s completion. This forces me to allow a given subject to take as long as it’s going to take. In the past, I have been plagued with the feeling that I can’t ever complete something because I believe that I should be able to get it done faster than I am. It always perplexed me when people talked in terms of months and years. For me, I always expect myself to finish something in a week or two. No more! I will let each subject draw out as long as is needed for me to complete it.

Well, there it is… That’s how Haiku Productivity looks for me. It might seem a little complicated, but when you want to do as much as I want to do, I don’t know how else to structure it.

Have any suggestions? Leave ‘em in the comments.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.