i’ve been working at night from home lately and have decided that it just does not work. i end up going to bed around 3 with less accomplished than i could have cranked out in half the time from the office.
i’ve decided that this is in part due to the fact that as long as i stay in the office, the incentive to finish what i’m doing is that i get to go home. at home, there is no such incentive (aside from sleep, i suppose) and so the urgency to complete things just isn’t there.
I’ve been pondering to do lists lately, and one of the shortcomings i’ve experienced with to do lists is that, when working in teams, my to dos are sometimes partially or entirely contingent upon someone else in the team completing something on their to do list.
in the end, when someone at the beginning of the chain (myself included) falls behind on one of their to dos, it makes it appear on the surface as though people on the end of the chain went over their budgeted time, when in fact they may have actually completed their task faster than originally budgeted but finished later than planned because of the prior setbacks of others on the team.
i wonder if there is a more robust to do list tool than the ones i am using to link up lists in this way and to visualize the time spent more effectively.
A while back I had decided that it was daunting, stressful and depressing to try and complete large creative tasks in the face of work commitments, personal life and tivo addiction. As a result, I decided that smaller creative tasks for which I could allocate small chunks of time each day would be more reasonable and as a result more fulfilling. Perhaps through sheer laziness I didn’t stick to that plan very long.
This year I hope to stage a return to small things, in the hopes that they will become the building blocks to larger things down the line. Fingers crossed.
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