Category: Strategies

Review: Zen to Done

9/29/2022

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts that highlight some of the books and other resources that I've found helpful in learning to manage my time and energy. This one was recommended to me by my sister-in-law, and I've decided to highlight it first because I think it's an amazing place to start if you're feeling overwhelmed.

Zen to Done is written by Leo Babauta, who is well-known in the world of minimalism, but you don't have to be a hardline minimalist to appreciate this book. As described on Babauta's website, Zen To Done, or ZTD, is a response to the Getting Things Done productivity method, with a more streamlined approach.

0 Comments

Wait, what was I doing? Combating time fragmentation and attention residue.

9/2/2021

0 Comments

Over the last few weeks, I have been packing up everything I own to move to a new town. The process of moving is always stressful (though it can be exciting as well!), and a bit part of the stress is the way all the little tasks of moving show up as constant distractions. There are boxes everywhere reminding you that you meant to pack that book you finished last night, the morning mail arrival makes you realize you need to start forwarding the mail, and then there's the actual process of moving, which never comes at a convenient time.

For the last few weeks, I've had my time divided up into smaller and smaller slices every day, and even though I'm still working roughly the same hours, it feels like I haven't made anywhere near as much progress is usual. The first few times this happened to me (I have moved many times in the last few years), I was frustrated. I was still working as much as I had planned, squeezing in 15 minutes here and 20 there on projects. So if I was putting in the same time, why was I not getting the same results?

0 Comments

Prioritization with urgent-important matrices

7/1/2021

0 Comments

I don't know about you, but it seems that for every item I check off my to-do list, there are five more that pop up from various locations. Maybe it's a request from a colleague, an idea I got from reading an article that I'd like to implement in my work, a suggestion from a supervisor or mentor, or a commitment to family or friends that arose from a conversation. Whatever the origin of these tasks, they have a tendency to snowball if we aren't careful about paring them down (or learning to say "no", which is a thing I am very bad at and I promise will someday be a blog post of its very own).

When things pile up, it can quickly feel impossible to accomplish any of them, let alone all of them. If only there were a neat tool to help distinguish between which activities are high priority and which we shouldn't even bother with.

It turns out, there is!

0 Comments

Goal Reviews

7/1/2021

0 Comments

You might notice this post is very late this month. I try to get my posts out within a few days of the first of the month. I think consistency is important, and it helps me stay on track. This month, however, I fell into a trap that I have definitely mentioned before and cautioned against: I set some way too ambitious deadlines for myself, and the last three or four weeks I’ve been scrambling to catch up.

It’s total coincidence that this month I was planning to write about goal reviewing, but I am so glad that it worked out that way. Let my late post be an example that this process is not simple or linear, and that you will have to re-evaluate constantly.

0 Comments

Goal setting: be SMART about it

7/1/2021

0 Comments

There's more to setting goals than putting check boxes next to your aspirations.

When I was about halfway through my doctoral program, I realized that I was really overwhelmed. I had been stressed for a long time, and I was certainly aware of how the pressures of grad school were feeding into my overall anxiety, but I had been working hard to set goals for myself and try to meet them. I just wasn’t succeeding. What was making me so stuck?

0 Comments

Time sprinting

7/1/2021

0 Comments

Batching your time for better focus and reducing procrastination.

One of the biggest barriers to our work-life balance is the amount of time we spend neither working nor playing.

You know the time I mean. It’s when you’re sitting at your desk, dreading some task that feels boring or intimidating or even impossible. You don’t want to start the task, either because you fear you can’t accomplish it in the end or because you just don’t want to do it. So you haven’t started. But instead of using the time not spent on that task to do some other important task or to rest and recover, you spend it worrying, your attention divided between whatever it is you tell yourself you’re focusing on and your dread.

0 Comments

Building Balance

Review: Zen to Done

Wait, what was I doing? Combating time fragmentation and attention residue.

Prioritization with urgent-important matrices

Goal Reviews

Goal setting: be SMART about it

Time sprinting

Author

Archives

Categories