2005-08-14 08:28 ☼ post
I just came upon a nice article by Steve Pavlina about Dynamic Planning that I wanted to mention because it has a couple points about working on projects that I found very useful. The following part really rang true for me:
My preference is to focus on a single project for as long as possible, doing a variety of actions in a row. Once I’ve loaded a project into my brain’s active RAM, I don’t like to unload it. Much efficiency is lost in the process of rebuilding awareness of a project. If I haven’t worked on a project for a while, it can take me anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours to fully reload the project into my brain‚ this is especially true for technical work or very large and complex projects.
Steve also goes on to suggest in the article that one of the hidden causes of procrastination for many people is that it forces you to put yourself in a situation where you have to focus entirely on one particular task to get it done in time. If you recognize this in yourself (as I certainly do) you can change your approach to always specifically scheduling continuous chunks of time to work on the things that are best accomplished without significant interuptions. In my case it would probably also be wise to factor in some “warm-up” time for a given task because sometimes it’s hard for me to just jump back into something cold.