BrockLi Soup

For the second time this week, I’m wreaking havoc on my subscriptions in Google Reader, because ya know what? I don’t need this much news, nor the guilt I feel for never reading it. Even so, I feel just a little guilty every time I removed a blog, even though I don’t know any of the authors and rarely even read their posts.

I’m down to around 130 feeds now. I know that sounds ridiculous, until I tell you that I cut about 60 earlier this week, and 20 more since I started writing this post. A lot of the remaining 130 don’t update regularly - probably 20 are friends that don’t blog much, and another 30 are other low-post feeds. I can’t believe that six months ago, I managed to keep up on so many of them. No wonder I didn’t go out much.

And as long as we’re talking productivity, I FINALLY started reading Getting Things Done this week. I’ve been reading it on the Metro, so I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I’m feeling a lot more relaxed - knowing that I’m at least taking some initiative to sort out this mess has reduced my stress level a fair bit. Cleaning out my feed reader is step one - I know very little about the GTD system at this point, but I think that getting rid of all that unnecessary distraction will help.

And as long as we’re talking books, I also started The God Delusion last week, and I’m liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Richard Dawkins has always seems kind of dry, and…well, BRITISH, so I was worried it would be boring, but he keeps a pretty good pace. It’s another book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally got around to starting.

And as long as we’re talking about God, I feel I should mention that we decided on Friday that “God” shall henceforth be known as “göd” (pronounced sort of like “gurd,” for those of you that don’t speak German). Just so you all know.

I suddenly realized, at 4:37 this afternoon, that it was already 4:37. I had a busy day, going back and forth between a few different projects, so time went by quick and I got a lot done (of course, it was 6:37 by the time I left, but that’s beside the point).

I’ve always been the most productive - and the happiest - when I’ve got a lot on my plate. My senior year of high school, I stayed a few hours after class almost every day, for one thing or another, and worked about 20 hours a week, and I was never bored. During a lot of quarters at RIT, I was just as busy. I remember starting my co-op with the College of Business, back in March 2005, and loving the set, 8-hour day…for about a month. It got monotonous quick, and I was looking forward to going back to unbalanced class and part-time work schedules, because it kept things interesting.

These days, I find that I’m the least productive when I’ve only got one thing to do and no definite deadline. If I know I’ve got a half-dozen things to do in the next couple of days, I know I have to hurry up and get things done, and I do. Without any real pressure, I just can’t seem to focus on any of it.

Things are getting busy again at work, and it’s refreshing. It was kind of quite for a little while, which was nice during the summer, but it’s definitely best to keep busy during the colder months. And for some reason, leaving work after dark feels so much more satisfying, like you’ve used the day to it’s fullest potential. I’m juggling more projects that I have since I started this job and it gets dark early, so I think the next couple months will be good for me.

This has been the most productive Saturday I’ve had all quarter. As mentioned, I do tech support all day every week. The students in this program are given a laptop, so I’m here to support them. This generally entails short bursts of overwhelming work followed by an hour or two of nothing - since they use the laptops in class, I don’t want to take them away to work on them, so I get as much done as I can during their breaks. When I first started, I figured it was perfect because I would be able to spend a decent part of the day working on homework.

I think we all know that things never work out like that. Over five weeks, I’ve spent a grand total of about three hours on actual homework, but a couple dozen on Internet reading and flash games.

Today, though, I’ve been all sorts of productive. I finished a lab report and study guide , and got started on a project for Tech Transfer. It doesn’t seem like a lot (and it really isn’t, now that I think about it), but I’m happy that I managed to avoid distraction for a little while. I really need to get cracking on my to-do list: on top of homework, I’ve got three web projects on the side and a serious job search underway. It’ll all work out; it always does.

About a month ago, I discovered the Hipster PDA. The library sells 100-packs of index cards for a quarter each, so I grabbed some loose change and bought a couple hundred. I’d keep a dozen or so loose in my back pocket and jot reminders to myself on them - mostly things I needed to remember to do. A week later, I stopped by the book store and bought a pack of binder clips to keep them together. The finished product can be seen to the right.

43 Folders has since suggested a number of different tips for using the Hipster PDA, most of them focusing on the Getting Things Done system. I only got a few pages into it before I lost interest, so I never became one of the hardcore productivity nuts. Rather than having a systematic method to it, I think it’s nice just to be able to jot down notes when I need to. In any given day, there are dozens of things I think of during class, like project ideas, upcoming seminars, mailing a credit card bill, or making a phone call after class. I’ve been finding more and more that making a quick note is a lot more efficient than just hoping I don’t forget about it. When I come home at the end of the day, I pull out the stack and take care of things I need to do, or put reminders in iCal for things that are coming up. It comes in real handy.

If anyone wants to give it a try, let me know; the binder clips only came in variety packs, so I’ve got 5 or 6 more of them and about 500 index cards.