Forcing focus

Recently, I found myself struggling to focus. I think the change of pace to coding threw me off.

As a manager, I zipped around constantly; frankly, there were too many conversations and issues all up in the air, so I had to choose, but there was always something. As a developer, I spend a much greater amount of my time staring at the screen. Plenty of things to do, of course, but at my own pace. Which is good, just different.

So, I implemented something that forced me to stay on track: I log the time and a very, very brief description whenever I start doing a new task. Says here today I started at 8:50 reading email, got some breakfast at 9, did some data scripting from 9:05, etc.

After about three days of this, I learned two things very quickly.

First, forcing myself to note the time whenever I switched tasks made me accountable. If I took an hour lunch break, it's there in the log. I know where my day went. When I'm spending too much time chit-chatting or doing non-productive tasks, I become conscious of it quickly, and feel pressured (by myself) to get focused on real work.

Second, I was hopping between tasks too often. I still do, but now I'm better about trying to bundle my interruptions. If I'm in the middle of coding, then I'll wait until I have to go get food before I also reply to some emails. This should be intuitive, but I'm so used to interruptions that I was distracting myself constantly.

I don't find anything wrong with realizing that I might need help to stay disciplined. Sure, I'd rather be ultra-disciplined all the time, but better to realize the need and take action than to continue failing. As they say, if you can't stop eating all the ice cream, don't keep any around the house.

(Side note: logging all my tasks is quite a bit like Dave Winer's suggestion to Narrate Your Work. Though my list remains private, I still accrue to myself some of the same benefits.)