Getting Things Done

February 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment

My biggest current problem can be summarised in one word – Lack of Productivity. See how I confounded your expectations by telling you it was one word and it turned out to be three? How clever of me.

It’s hardly a unique difficulty. Lots of sites have been dedicated to productivity tips and lifehacks. Rands of Rands in Repose fame has written an excellent blog entry about the phenomena I experience and christened it NADD – Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder.

I’ve always had this issue, but at least when you’re working for a company there’s some structure to your day and some strong accountability. Now that I’m in freelance world, I can just float away into unproductive bliss and no-one’s any the wiser. Except of course, me. And it’s not bliss. It’s really frustrating.

It’s not helped that I’m interested in so much stuff. I’ve never been what I would call a “proper” programmer, but I’ve always tinkered with stuff on the computer that gets me excited. I’ve had phases of being obsessed with a certain technology, explored it until I get bored then dropped it like a hot potato.

Over the years, I’ve tinkered with:

In the past 15 years I’ve spent almost all my free time using computers, but I’ve got very little to show for it. My knowledge is broad rather than deep. Although this is part of who I am, and I’m happy to be like that, it does mean that I’m incredibly easily distracted. Recently, I went into the technical section of the local Borders bookshop for the first time and felt like I’d discovered my personal Mecca. I’d say offhand that more than 70% of the books there held something of interest for me, whether it was 3D modelling, Java or XML.

So maybe you start to see how these interests, combined with a lack of focus, lots of new ideas and a fast broadband connection make for a fairly chaotic and unproductive day. Even when I was working for a company, I’d be trying to do a simple spreadsheet for my manager, and before I knew what had happened, I was delving into the depths of the ODBC preferences pane, obsessed with how to show live data from an external SQL database – totally off-track and completely away with the fairies. I get pretty excited, you see, when it comes to trying to use technology to solve problems, albeit in utterly impractical ways.

I am, after all, the person who, when working for a charity with 10 employees and tasked to make a system to track evidence for funders, came up with a 30 Meg Excel spreadsheet that had 70 sheets, thousands of hidden cells and VBA macros galore.

And I was the chap who, at the same company, tried to monitor the activity of the 20-30 clients we served by designing a system that used SQL Server, Exchange Server, Active Directory, ASP, Access, Outlook and ODBC to automate client registration and monitor activity. Needless to say, I learnt loads and I had an awful lot of fun trying how to program this. Needless to say it never even got close to being finished and the charity no longer exists.

There’s also a psychological side. A part of my brain somehow associates being productive as average, normal, safe and logical. I see it as the Responsible Thing To Do, as boring, and finally, (and this is the worst) *sensible*. Urrrgh – no, please, anything but that. But to achieve a lot of my goals, I must accept that I have to be sensible. And… well… if I’m really honest, most of my day is spent being sensible, even if I don’t set out to be. What would you call sitting inside experimenting on a computer with stuff you find interesting? It’s hardly all night raves, hookers and blow territory.

I’ve must accept that this image I have of productivity is fabricated, and face up to the ultimate truth that being productive just means getting stuff done. But getting stuff done has different meanings depending on your work situation. If you’re employed in a job you hate, getting stuff done means having to plough through lots of meaningless tasks that you despise. If you’ve got a new exciting opportunity, even if that means a lot of hard work, getting stuff done can be brilliant fun.

I’m now in the latter situation, having worked for many years in the former. So productivity should now fill me with joy – the prospect of being able to work on my latest project gets my juices flowing just thinking about it. But my brain is clinging to the old definition. And even with the best of projects, there is always some of the stuff you hate that has to get done – in my case, the finances, bill paying, tax return, etc.

These hateful, soulless, dead end tasks (pain productivity) seem to be stopping me from getting on with my exciting stuff (pleasure productivity). And it’s all due to putting them off. Why, oh why do I think, at some level, that unpleasant tasks will somehow get better the longer I leave them? I plan my day that I’ll get all those rubbish-tasks-I’ve-been-meaning-to-do-for-ages done before I start anything else. So I know I should start them, but, er, “I’ll start in a minute”. I distract myself and delay for hours so I don’t start the rubbish stuff until 2pm. By the time I’ve finished with the pain productivity, it’s 4pm and my day’s gone.

And somehow it’s goodbye to yet another day where I could have got some great stuff done. Sure – I’ve done a few crappy tasks, but because of my constant delaying, I’ve never got around to giving myself the treat of the good stuff that I love. Which is tied to my big goals. Sigh.

I’d love to hear from any of you with the same problem. How have you dealt with it? How productive are you?

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