Skip to main content

Ducks In A Row

I'm trying to "get all my ducks in a row" as the saying goes. I've got a lot of standing projects, some personal and some professional and many straddling a line between those two.

As part of the process of figuring out what I need to do, I need to figure out what I want to do. I've got a broad range of things demanding my time and a broader range of things I'm wishing I could put my time to. There simply isn't enough of me to go around.

I see so many others around and they seem so much more productive than me. Where do you find the time? How do you do it? I've obviously got some missing element I need to find.

The plan at hand is a simple set of actions.

  • Track my time 24 hours a day. This keeps me focused, especially for non-billable hours.
  • Decide on each standing project if I can do anything. If not now, archive it. If never, delete it.
  • Write every morning. Write more whenever I have something on my mind.
There are things I wish I had time for that I never will. I never sketch any more and I haven't picked up the guitar in a decade. I'll focus on what I can accomplish so that I don't have time to feel bad about the things I cannot accomplish.

Comments

Little tip. You are focusing on the 'what'. That is fine, but its a level 1 prioritization of things. The things you need for todays tasks.

If you want to get to level 2 kind of productivity then you need to be asking 'who' in two directions. Who is demanding tasks of me and is their request superior to other who's on my plate. The second part of the equation is who could some of the requests be delegated to if any? Be sure to include yourself in the matrix of who in the prioritzation.

We go through life with constant demands to get-things-done. Much of the world finds that just perfect. But those that seem more productive are not asking how to be more productive but who to be more productive with.

Find the who.

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...