The Penalty Box

Recently at work I’ve been whittling down the “To Do” list that has been building up.  You know, the one that has items in a perpetual state of “I’ll do it when I have time,” and then you seemingly never have time.  Priorities shift depending on the circumstances; some items move up and some move down.  Having a “To Do” list isn’t a bad thing; it helps keep us organize and provides a sense of order.

But you know those things you wish you could do, but you never think you have the time for? It turns out, you probably do, but you just don’t realize it.  There are many things in our daily lives that we do that, little by little, consume far too much of our time than is good for us.  Therefore, in conjunction with your “To Do” list, you should also come up with a “Not To Do” list.  This list should consist of small things that you do too often that you can cut down on, and the world will not end.  Here are a few of mine:

1. Check e-mail at scheduled points of the day, or to a maximum amount: I used to periodically check my e-mail, up to several times an hour.  This led me to get distracted far too many times from the task I really ought to be doing, which would then delay other tasks on my “To Do” list.  The problem is that by checking my e-mail so often, once an e-mail came in, I felt compelled to answer it or deal with it in some way (file it, tag it, etc).  Was everything urgent enough to need that much attention? Not even close.  But little by little, e-mail began to consume more and more of my time.   Deal with your e-mail in batches; it’s much more efficient, and you don’t needlessly distract yourself.  Once you get distracted, it takes time to re-focus, time that could’ve been spent being productive on your task at hand.
2. As a caveat to the first one, don’t check your e-mail first thing in the morning or just before you go to bed: Wait until you’ve woken up (or at least exited that zombie state) for the former.  Dealing with e-mail first thing in the morning breaks up your routine, shifts priorities and throws a monkey wrench into the plans you have.  This is all part of the distractions that make you lose focus and cause you to spend time re-focusing.  Take care of at least one critical thing first (aside from morning coffee/tea) and then move onto your e-mail.  As for the latter, you’ll just cause yourself to think too much about whatever comes in.  Having your brain churn that much just before you’re going to sleep isn’t going to give you a decent night’s rest.  Deal with it in the morning; you’ll exit zombie state faster and you’ll sleep better.
3. Learn the difference between rambling and productive small talk: If you’re like me, you’re not a fan of ramblers.  Idle chit chat ends up in a conversation about nothing and prevents you from doing anything useful/fun.  Starting every conversation with “How’s it going?” seems to be a reflex among a lot of people I know, especially co-workers.  I know they don’t actually want to know, because that question inevitably leads to what I’m working on, and it’s generally not remotely interesting to them.  The annoying times are when the question is asked in passing; if you’re not willing to stop to have a conversation, don’t ask.  However, corporate ladder climbing and networking for jobs involves small talk, so it’s good to learn the difference between productive small talk that will land you opportunities and unproductive rambling that goes nowhere.  One greases social gears for life in general, the other is just a waste of time.
4. Pick your battles: In a perfect world, you could fight for everything you believe to be right and win, even down to the smallest thing.  Dealing fellow humans changes that.  Messy complicated issues like politics weigh down what is right, where “right” can be subjective (ex. how often you clean, do pens have to be 90 degrees to pads of paper, should corporal punishment be allowed in parenting).  Learning how to let some of the smaller things slide can remove a lot of stress from your life, and consequently you can be a little happier not getting mad over them.  Other times, it just isn’t appropriate to fight battles because even if you win that battle, you lose the war.  Anyone who has worked in any place, whether it be an office or lab, for a nontrivial amount of time knows what I’m talking about.  Don’t get me wrong, venting to a confidant always helps to release some pent up frustrations, but fighting every battle leaves you weary, unhappy and worse off overall.  Pick the ones really worth fighting for, take back the time spent on the ones that aren’t.
5. Stop checking your feed reader so much: I have gone from obsessively checking my e-mail to obsessively checking my feed reader.  Google Reader has made it much easier to group all of my RSS feeds together.  It also piles up much quicker because many of my feeds update frequently, particularly the news feeds.  There’s something about seeing more than 50 unread items that bugs me, but this is something I’m working on.  In a lot of cases, looking at your feed reader so much is worse than checking your e-mail; it can be like Wikipedia surfing…one good article leads to another, and then another, and then another.  All of a sudden, 2 hours have slipped by and you think to yourself, “Oh crap…there was stuff I needed to do in those two hours.  Eh, maybe just one more.”

The best part of a “Not To Do” list? You can keep doing the stuff on it and accomplish something all the time.