Let the blog see the rabbit...

I previously considered frosty something of a role model in terms of being organised and getting things done. His "Procrastination and That" talk was excellent and introduced me to the concept of Getting Things Done (GTD).

When I first watched his talk, I downloaded FlexTime and tried the (10 + 2) * 5 dash but even before my 30 day trial had run out, I'd got fed up of having my work interrupted every ten minutes and gave up on the idea of dashes. The thing is - if you've got yourself into the right frame of mind to work, you don't need any cunning techniques: you can just sit down and get on with it.

However, frosty has been awarded 343 green bananas (link only works for logged-in SUCS members) by rollercow - one per day since the talks in February last year - because he still hasn't uploaded the videos for them. While I could spend the rest of this post bitching at frosty, it would hardly be fair to do so - we all suffer from this problem. Hell, even the David Allen Company, who you'd expect to do better than most people, only put out one podcast episode in the whole of 2008. And I certainly have no room to talk - I only wrote two blog entries last year!

I find that I go through phases of being super-efficient and organised and then switch to being utterly lazy. Maybe it's a mild SAD-related thing. There's an easy way to tell if I'm in the utterly lazy phase - there'll be a load of email sitting in my inbox unfiled.

$ ls -l /var/spool/mail/dez
-rw-rw---- 1 dez mail 608 Jan 27 20:16 /var/spool/mail/dez

So I'm doing OK at the moment... :-)

Actually, I've not been doing so well with this blog entry. I had the original idea for it on Monday last week when I was brainstorming possible topics to blog about and I'd intended to have it written by yesterday in plenty of time for the deadline for my 4th entry in the Blog-a-week competition, but I spent all of yesterday afternoon drafting the new design for the Big Red Design website. Still, at least I was doing something useful.

Being self-employed makes it very easy to ignore things that you really ought to do especially when there's no-one else to enforce a deadline on you. Sometimes even where there is an external deadline, of course, you can find yourself putting it off until the last minute but in general, you do get it done. I think I've had my website redesign on my to do list pretty much since I first installed Things. I even started a design towards the end of August, but it lost momentum and I never finished it.

The old "Give a busy person a job" thing is definitely true - indeed, my current bout of being efficient was triggered by getting a new web design client. Of course the trick is to manage to remain busy, keep the momentum up and sustain the efficient period as long as possible.