As promised, this post will mostly be an update to this previous post. What has been going well and what hasn’t worked out. Plus anything else I’ve been doing recently that has been helping me get more stuff done. Let’s get right to it.
Chores
I was already a while into this one when I wrote the first post, so I knew it was going to work out in the long run. And for the last few months, it really has made a difference in how I approach the chores that I don’t like. Dishes in particular are my least favorite chore (yes, even below cleaning the cat box), but knowing that it’s a morning chore takes a lot of pressure off every night. The only issue with the morning block is that if the dishes take longer than normal, or if I get a late start to the morning, it leaves no time for practicing guitar before work, which I always look forward to.
For sure, when it comes to things that you have to do, batching tasks and giving them a set time each day makes it a lot easier to keep on top of them.
Exercise
This is another area that has been going very well. I was still new to Orange Theory at the time I wrote the last post and only going two times a week. Now, both my fiancée are going at least three times a week, and it feels great. With as much as I need to get done, it’s a much stronger motivator to exercise when there is a set time that I must show up for (or risk losing money). I held off on going up from two times a week because I thought that I would go running on the weekends, but that never happened, as I predicted it would. I intend to keep going with my races (up to 10Ks now!) once per month, but the only training I’m going to do for those is with OT.
My advice is the same as before. If you have trouble committing to exercise, sign up for classes. It is a vastly superior option to going solo at the gym.
Using JIRA
I’m so glad I decided to go this route for keeping track of the personal tasks I want to get accomplished, though it has been a struggle finding that sweet spot of how much I should plan to do during the month. After several months, it would appear that on average I can complete 3-3.5 days worth of personal stuff, so around 80-90 hours, or 3 hours per day. That seems logical since an hour of that is listening to audiobooks to and from work, and the other two hours are things like studying French/German (started German since getting back from the trip, and it is significantly easier than French, partly because it’s the language I took in high school) and reading. The time it takes to write and proofread these posts are also tracked in JIRA, plus anything else that takes a worthwhile chunk of time to complete (at least 30 minutes). Normal day to day tasks are not tracked in JIRA, but I do track them either on my weekly list or as reminders if they are time sensitive or need to happen during work hours.
The biggest problem I still have is that I keep putting more tasks in the sprints than I can actually get through. For a while I didn’t know what to do with tasks that were going to take a few months to complete since they don’t fit the sprint model, so I would just put them in there anyway. This makes all of the graphs look awful though. They seem to indicate that I’m not getting as much done as I am, so I just settled on keeping track of these tasks by always having them at the top of the backlog list until they are small enough to be finished off in a month’s time.
I will stop before I put anyone to sleep with details, but it has also proven to be a great tool for keeping me on track with what I want to get done.
Incentive System
Unlike everything else, this ended up being a complete flop. As I suspected quickly after starting, unless you can come up with rewards that work for everyone involved, there are no incentives, so the whole thing just falls apart. I do still think the idea is a good one, it just needs to be rethought for different groups. I can see what I came up with working well if the group is made up of people who are doing the same things and are just competing to see who does the most over a period of time. But since my goals were vastly different from my fiancée’s, there was no real way to make them equal to each other. It was too easy for me to get way ahead of her because of the tasks involved, so she never had a chance to catch up.
In the end, the system is useless if there aren’t reasonable rewards to be had. Neither of us could come up with something since we already do as much for each other as possible without needing an excuse to do so. If I were to do it again, I’d probably do something with coworkers, and the reward would simply be a money pot or something else that everyone pitches into. Really no different from a gambling pool, or some other competition for a prize, but includes a tracking system that everyone can see. And realistically, the other methods I use for tracking are enough to keep me going towards my goals.
New Stuff
Not a whole lot of new things, but there are couple worth mentioning. Most of these have come either from Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy (highly repetitive, but has enough good content to be worth a read) or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, the book that every other self-help book tries to emulate. Seriously, I had no idea until I actually read it just how much every other book in its genre is just a rehash of what he wrote 25 years ago. It is absolutely worth reading for that reason alone.
One of the biggest takeaways I got from both books is that I didn’t have a really clear vision of what and where I wanted to be in a year, five years, or ten years. They both recommend writing those visions out as concrete goals, and then try to list everything I can think of that will get me one step closer toward those goals. I’ve done that before, a lot of my JIRA tasks are doing just that. But what I didn’t do that they brought to light was that I wasn’t doing a good enough job of prioritizing the goals. I kept thinking about what I felt should get done first, when I should’ve been thinking about which ones will have the most positive impact on me, and focus on those first. A very small difference, but caused a big change in my thinking.
Another good tip that I got is to always plan out my days the day before. I’d heard of doing this in the past, but I didn’t put much stock in it until I saw the common thread in these books and decided that it would be worth a shot. So I started out by just doing it at work, and it helped a bit, though it doesn’t work as well when I’m lacking in things to do, or I get blocked by something/someone else, or there I get a higher priority request that needs to be done that day. It has proven to be a lot more useful at home where I have no shortage of things to do.
The last thing I’ve been trying to get better at is focusing on one big task at a time. I’ve struggled to do this for a long time, so it’s not a new concept to me, but I figured I’d mention it since it’s talked about ad nauseum in those books. As a way to keep myself on a single goal at a time, I have changed my routine such that outside of reading and exercising, all of my free time will be focused on one thing until it is done. So instead of trying to set aside some time for languages, some time for writing, some time for guitar, etc. on a daily basis, I’m going to go all out on just one thing. I think to start with, I’m going to focus on getting through all the lessons on Duolingo for French and German. Once I’ve gotten through those, I can start a routine of just practicing them on a regular basis to build up the mental muscle, probably for 15-30 minutes each morning. This is not to say that I won’t spend some time doing other things that are relaxing, but I know that I have to push something off. Knowing ahead of time what I’m pushing off will keep me from getting frustrated when I keep falling behind on things.
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That being said, thanks to those tips, I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to write these posts on a weekly basis is not a high enough priority for me to keep it going. Compared to all of my other goals, posting on a website that no one really reads is generally a waste of my time when I could be using my writing time on something more useful, like stories. So, it was a fun challenge to keep this going for a few months, but I don’t feel like there are enough (or any) benefits to doing this on a regular basis. I might take some time to write a post here or there if something comes to me, but for now, the site will go back to its dormant state until I have something that I feel is worthwhile putting up here. Hopefully with some of these changes, that will come sooner rather than later.
Have a good one!