Category: Personal Development

It’s eye-opening to review your progress towards your goals every so often. GTD advocates will push for the weekly review. I try to use my Saturday mornings to go through my non-urgent snail mail, enter my monetary transactions into GnuCash, and update my calendar. I’m still pretty new to using GTD techniques, but I already know I can make huge progress. And while the weekly review is great, I know that I need to also schedule other reviews to keep myself on track, especially when I miss a week or two…or three. Maybe four.

That’s how May was for me. I wasn’t nearly as productive as I have been in previous months. I wasn’t keeping on top of things. I meant to keep a list of items on a pad of paper with me, but I almost never had it updated or nearby.

I did manage to make a simple game, as I mentioned in the Learning Kyra series. In the last article, I mentioned that I was considering the project complete and moving on. Apparently I didn’t listen to myself. I’ve already changed it a bit, and I’ve decided that I will continue to work on it until it is fully polished. Menus, levels, etc.

I unfortunately haven’t touched this project in weeks.

So I can see that this month wasn’t very productive, and yet I did manage to do certain things regularly. In fact, if I was this productive years ago, I would have been happy. So what went right?

The Unix utility calendar was an amazing tool for keeping me on track. It’s a command line tool similar to the Mac application Remind, which was covered at 43Folders.com a few months back. Basically, you enter a date, a tab, and single line into a file called calendar in your home directory. When you run calendar, it will tell you what’s going on that day, and you can also set it to tell you what happens for an arbitrary number of days or on a specific date. A portion of my calendar file:

/* PROGRAMMING */
Mon PROGRAM: 2 Hour
Tue PROGRAM: 2 Hour
*/SunLast Chicago Indie Gamer Meeting (last Sunday of month)
6/11/05 Game in a Day: Theme == Fusion
6/12/05 Game in a Day: Theme == Fusion
7/16/05 Game in a Day: Theme == Ghosts
7/17/05 Game in a Day: Theme == Ghosts

/* APPOINTMENTS */
8/20/05 Dentist Appointment @ 9AM

So as you can see, I have set aside Mondays and Tuesdays for programming a couple of hours a day. I also have some specific dates. This coming June 11th and 12th are the dates for Game in a Day. I also have a dentist appointment on August 20th. The last Sunday of every month is the Chicago Indie Game Developer’s meetup.

Ok, so now they are all in a file, but that’s not entirely useful by itself. What is useful is that the command calendar can be set to run whenever I login to a shell on my Gnu/Linux system. I added the following line in my .bash_profile:

calendar -l 7

Using “-A 7” would do the same. When I login to a shell, it will output what will happen for the next week. For today, for example, calendar -l 7 outputs:

Jun 02* DLC: Meeting
Jun 02 Open Source Seminar
Jun 03 PAYDAY!!!
Jun 06* PROGRAM: 2 Hour
Jun 07* PROGRAM: 2 Hour

Since I am always using my computer, this tool is great. Every day I am aware of the coming week. Even if I am not updating my own paper calendar, I always update the computer listing. I’ve been using it for months, and I keep track of appointments, weddings, and deadlines with ease. Even when I am having a poor productivity month, I will at least not forget important birthdays or anniversaries. Which reminds me…

And the fact that I am being reminded of anything means that I am keeping things in my head when they should be down on paper. Therefore, I’ve dedicated June as the month when I improve on my ability to track goals and progress.

I talked previously about how I enjoyed listening to the audio book “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself” by Steve Chandler. I really liked how much I learned from listening to a tape while driving. So I recently bought another audio book called “Develop a Super Memory Auto-matically”. I didn’t know about it previously, but I saw it when I was at Barnes & Noble. I’m interested in learning how to remember things more consistently and clearly.

This audio book, however, was not one I should have bought. Here is a break down on how the tape runs:

• “Hi, welcome to the tape. First, to increase your memory, stop saying you have a bad memory. You need to believe you can have a good memory.”
• Lame music with positive affirmations you’re supposed to repeat to yourself.
• “Forgetting someone’s name isn’t because of bad memory but because you weren’t paying attention or focused.”
• Lame music with positive affirmations you’re supposed to repeat to yourself.
• Fake conversation with other host: “I can remember student names within the first hour of a new class.” “Wait a minute, Bob, are you blah blah blah blah seriously?” “Why, yes, Diedre, blah blah blah I’ll give you the secret but first let’s have more positive affirmation time.” “Ok!”
• Lame music with positive affirmations you’re supposed to repeat to yourself.
• “The secret…No, wait, just a description of the secret’s results. Let’s take an affirmation break.”
• Lame music with positive affirmations you’re supposed to repeat to yourself.

And so on. I plan on finishing the tape, even though the big secret isn’t really a secret. I’ve read about associating a number with a specific item, such as 1=T/Tea, 2=N/Noah, 3=M,May, etc. And I’ve read that making absurd images and using other senses help you to remember. If anything redeems itself, it is the fact that the tape talks about this “memorizing lists” technique in a more natural pace than what I’ve read. I can actually see myself making use of this technique.

Still, it’s an audio tape. If I feel the need to reaffirm that I have the ability to remember things, I’ll rewind to listen to an “affirmation break” from the beginning. I don’t need it strewn throughout the tape, interrupting the flow of learning. What really ticked me off was hearing the author say something like, “We usually use 30 items, but due to time constraints, we’ll only use 16.” Time constraints?! Maybe if you didn’t waste most of the tape with affirmations, you would have more time!

I’m fairly upset about it, but I have to realize that it is my fault that I wasn’t informed. In an age where reviews of any product by anyone in the world are easily available, I made a reckless purchasing decision. I would have seen that other people were also turned off by the repeated and mostly unnecessary affirmation breaks. I say mostly because I can see why the affirmations would be useful. Believing you can remember things well is necessary to learn how to remember things well. Still, did we really need to go through the affirmation breaks so many times?

I will no longer make impulse purchases without knowing something about the product first. I will probably pick up Mega Memory next time.

I am coding my last assignment of the quarter. It’s the huge project for the class, and it is due on Thursday. I didn’t know that fact until last Thursday. The class forum shows that I wasn’t the only one, which makes me feel a bit better about “forgetting” something that wasn’t very clear to begin with.

Anyway, within a few short days my last assignment will be complete, and after finals the next week, school itself is over. No, I will not have a graduate degree, but I will have more time which can be utilized in more meaningful ways. I can work on my own projects. I can work on my own skills. I can reintroduce myself to people I haven’t seen in some time. It’s weird how this time last year I never valued my time and was always stressed just trying to get by! I guess it shows how much I’ve grown, but it also shows me that I have a lot to learn as well.

In the meantime, since my internship requires me to attend school, I’ll need to find another job soon.

While perusing my now even longer list of RSS feeds in Firefox, I found an article about Acrobatic Rabbits. It was a shareware blog, so I was curious. It basically describes how the blogger’s rabbits don’t have the will to even attempt to escape simple wire meshes. Simple obstacles are all that is needed to prevent the rabbits from going where the owner doesn’t want them to go.

The last paragraph was insightful:

Just like a technically inadequate fence keeps rabbits inside, many people are kept inside their comfort zone by all sorts of barriers that are often mostly in their heads. How many part-time shareware authors keep dreaming of quitting the day job, but never do for all sorts of reasons? Reasons that, upon closer inspection, that are merely obstacles that could be scaled without too much trouble.

I have goals. Some aren’t nearly as fleshed out as I would like them to be, but they exist. But why is it that, for example, last month I was able to determine that I don’t practice programming nearly enough in order to gain experience and skill, and today I find that it is still the case? I could blame it on the fact that I haven’t been able to do so since I have work and school, both full-time, but that would just be placing blame somewhere else. If I want to do it, then I should just do it. I should be able to schedule time to exclusively work on coding, and then keep the commitment. I think the main obstacle isn’t necessarily some outside force so much as my own perception of how much of a force it is.

Thinking about the programming issue, I know that it is definitely possible to schedule time for it outside of class, homework, and work. I just haven’t done it because I let other things slip into my schedule without consciously saying that I am giving up something else. In Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about how we need to be able to not only say what we are doing, but also be ok with what we aren’t doing. Other time management and productivity authors have talked about the importance of saying no to opportunities that may not necessarily be opportunities.

This weekend, I wanted to try to do a Game in a Day. Unfortunately I spent Friday night playing a video game for way too long and didn’t get to sleep at a decent time. So I woke up later, which caused my entire day to start later. I was hoping to get the Game in a Day out of the way within 5 hours, giving myself the rest of the day to work on game reviews for Game Tunnel and my homework for class.

It is now early Sunday morning. I ended up sleeping in the afternoon so my sleep schedule is off. And so far I only got one game review done. No code written for the Game in a Day. No code written for my homework. It isn’t like the review was too ambitious, and it didn’t really take me all that long to write. I unfortunately spent a minute here and a minute there doing Other Things, like checking my email or talking to people online.

On that note, I am glad that I have this blog. It helps me realize that even though I never lied about what I’ve done, I wasn’t being honest with myself. Until I wrote all that down, I was feeling overworked and was subconsciously blaming it on all the things I needed to do or other people or time committments. Writing it down helps me by placing it in front of me to consciously analyze it so I can see what it is I can actually DO about it.

As Lao Tse says, “Your actions are your only assets.”

I am currently reading David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity. I am not even half way through it, and yet I am already increasing my productivity by applying what I am learning.

The beginning of the book gives a general overview of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system. I managed to pick up a few ideas, like the idea that everything that takes more than a few two minute actions should be considered a Project, or the idea of the Next Actions list. Up until recently, I simply made todo lists. I found that it helped me to remember important tasks. I was always forgetting things, and todo lists were a great tool to overcome that problem.

Of course, it didn’t take me too long to add a due date to some tasks. A game review needed for Game Tunnel? It wasn’t enough to say that I had to do it. I had to also say that it was due in two weeks. Homework #3 needs to get done? I need to know when, or else it might get put off.

This past week I started listing the next action needed on the different tasks. At work I keep a todo list of projects, but I started listing a Next Action next to each one. If a project involves building a server for someone, it might be held up because I need to learn more details about the build needed. The next action for that project is to call the person and ask about it. If I am waiting for more information about hard drives from a colleague, my next action is “Wait for colleague to get back to me.”

Before supplementing my todo lists with Next Actions, I had a vague sense of what I needed to do. Make a command line Tic-Tac-Toe game. Do the homework for my Tuesday night class. Items like this were somewhat high level, which is still good to know, but left me feeling stuck when I wanted to actually start any one of these projects.

Now, for each project I have on my list, I know exactly what I need to do in order to make some progress. And some progress is better than none. As Steve Pavlina said in his article Overcoming Procrastination “If you simply start a task enough times, you will eventually finish it.”

My current system isn’t very efficient, but it is definitely better than only a year ago when I was drifting through life. While I don’t want to get caught saying that it is “good enough” I don’t want to put off doing anything just because it isn’t perfect.