The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [69]
The Web is exactly that—a sticky web of unproductivity that can paralyze you the farther into it you go.
Once you have tracked all of your time for a day, give each item a rating of 1, 2, or 3. 1 = THING THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE IMMEDIATELY, 2 = THING THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE BUT NOT URGENTLY, 3 = DICK-AROUND TIME (I guess I lied about not using it again). This rating system can sometimes be challenging for Nerds because part of their DNA is placing HEAVY importance on things that seem essential but really are not. We tend toward OCD, without being quite unfortunate enough to have it. It’s like we’re in a rickety sloop perpetually circling OCD Island, but we never actually dock there. (Though if you’re counting to ten over and over as you circle you may have it.) The point here is, do your best to have an objective eye on your actions.
This kind of numerical prioritizing was greatly helpful to me after I was able to figure out my productivity threshold. Mine is roughly an hour, which means I’m good to spew out hot jets of viscous information for about sixty minutes before my brain gets flaccid. Were I to graph it, it would be a sine wave. When I sit down to work (like the writing of these very words, say), it always starts off a little slowly as the gears and cranks begin to turn and drive each other, but after a few minutes I hit that zone where the world melts away and my typing figures are merely a conduit from my thoughts to the digital page. At about the forty-five-minute mark, I start to lose focus. I start to drift off a tad, maybe noticing things on my desk or emails that came in. Then I have to go back and reread what I just wrote because I forgot it already. At this point, I know it’s time to take a break. I’m fine with that because I expect it. Now I can either do number 3 (back to searching for squirrels) or tackle a number 2 (either the priority rating or the dirtier way you could read that). And if I can’t seem to get in a zone or I get out of one, I can always change environments.
TIMECOP: BE YOUR OWN POLICE FORCE
I’m not trying to rob you of your dick-around time. You need dick-around time. If you don’t decompress in some way your brain will explode against the walls of your skull and the only time-management schedule you’ll be on is right after coloring time, when you take the pink pill that tastes like happy. The mission here is to better plot out your day so that you allow yourself some guilt-free dicking around. If you’re a freelancer or work independently within a company or organization, you are in charge of ALL OF THIS. If you work in a standard nine-to-five-type job, your slightly different task will be compartmentalizing your corporate projects to allow yourself room for outside passion projects or other things that require structured time.
There’s no complicated scheme. It boils down to this: Policing yourself is easy when you have a goal. The actual police use “the law” as their goal. Or even “drunkenness on power.” Figuring out your goals is easier than it sounds, and you certainly wouldn’t have purchased this book if you weren’t a white-hot pack of firecrackers with a can-do attitude. Once again, invoke the Dark Lord Charlie Rose! That’s it. Just take your brain aside and ask it some of those really good questions!
Your brain will spit out answers because it is a processing machine and that’s what it’s designed to do. You might even amaze yourself at the knowledge and ideas locked up in your cerebral Azkaban, just waiting to be sprung with a question or twelve. ALWAYS start with “What do I want?” You might get general answers like, “a billion dollars,” “truckloads of sex,” “a hover board,” “unified field theory,” and so on.
SPECIFY!: One of the