Silver Clipboard

Get More Done by Changing Locations

Working at home is a near-impossible task. The desire to clean my room — that evergreen procrastination standby — is omnipresent. My room also contains distracting things: my books, my movies, the Internet. In addition, my wife also shares the tiny room. If I’m not distracting myself, The Wife will be watching Star Trek. ‘Just one episode…’ I tell myself, ‘then I’ll get back to work.’

The small room my wife and I share is used for everything: sleeping, eating, watching DVDs, talking, arguing, and, err, thinking of England. It’s difficult to focus on one kind of task in a room with so many functions.

If I’m serious about getting things done, I need to get out of the flat. Luckily for me, living in a big city there are an abundance of places to go and work. Libraries, museums and cafes abound.

One of the benefits of working somewhere other than your home is that you can build, single, focused, positive associations with that place. If you always associate a location with getting things done — and nothing else — you will be more encouraged to work when you arrive.

Another source of motivation comes from is not wanting to waste the travel time to get to your work spot. If it takes twenty minutes to ‘commute’ to the library, don’t just sit there daydreaming. If you do then you’re doubly wasting time: once for the actual time and once for the commute time. Similarly, if Starbucks is a place of work, it would be a waste of the coffee money to just stare out the window. Increased guilt about not getting things done will increase the pressure to actually cross off some to-do items.

Through experiment, I’ve found that my optimal efficiency is to switch locations every sixty to ninety minutes. This way I get in two or three solid units of work but leave before I get bored or weary of what I’m working on. Then I’ll spend ten to thirty minutes walking to the next location. This downtime allows my brain to reboot and start whatever I’m working on anew when I get to the next spot.

Go outside, get away from distractions, and get things done!

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Photograph by artandscience

Enlightened Outsourcing

Over at 43folders, Ryan Norbauer wrote a post on the recently popular topic of outsourcing your life. It’s a two part series, starting with the psychological factors that make people resistant to outsourcing their lives, then moving on to practical steps how to do it.

While I normally think of outsourcing as a mainly Indian phenomenon, I was surprised by how much of Ryan’s work he offloaded to the United States or the rest of the First World.

I’ve just started trying to outsource some of my more mundane tasks to GetFriday so I’m sure I’ll be referring back to these articles many times.

[Click here for Enlightened outsourcing, Part 1: The psychology]

[Click here for Enlightened outsourcing Part 2: The practice]

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Header photograph by Meanest Indian

Easy Productivity Boost: the Half-hour Work Unit

Sitting down with the intention of doing three hours of work is a vain and dispiriting attempt. More often than not, you will either fail, lacking the staying power you envisioned, or be so burned out at the end that you’ll wish you hadn’t started. These negative reinforcements make you less likely to try again in the future.

The solution? When you sit down to work, never intend to do so for more than thirty minutes. Work for a thirty minute unit, then take a five minute break. Stretch your legs, get a cup of coffee, check your email, whatever. After the break either return to your work or switch tasks. (Just don’t forget to get an invisible clock to keep your break from stretching too far) Thirty minutes is a reasonable, achievable goal.

By only working thirty minutes at at time, it is easier to notice when you approach the point of diminishing returns. At the end of each thirty minute unit, you reevaluate your energy, how much you have left to do, and what other priorities are in your life.

Thirty minutes is a small, but still useful, unit of time, and it’s possible to squeeze in these slices of productivity during the day — if you start thinking in thirty minute chunks, you’ll find the space.

Work less, feel happier, and get more done.

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Header photograph by Lil Erna

Free Hard Drive Space with GrandPerspective

GrandPerspective is an OS X application that lets you visualize how much space files take up on your hard drive. This lets you quickly find what’s been hogging the most room and causing those scary ‘you are about to run out of space’ warning messages.

GrandPerspective is also helpful for teaching those less familiar with computers about the relative sizes of different kind of files. People like my mother, who will leave a 3Gb movie laying around, but spend hours deleting text files to try and free up space.

(The above photograph is from my own attempts to declutter my current laptop and see if I can squeeze down into 64Gb for the SSD on the new Macbook Air. Sadly, it looks like that won’t be an option.)

[Click here to download GrandPerspective]

Beware the Hawthorne Effect: Why You Feel More Productive When You Try a New System and Why it Doesn’t Last

Between 1924 and 1932 the Hawthorne Works Telephone Factory commissioned a series of experiments on their workers. The owners wanted to find out what environment would make the workers most productive. While the researchers never did figure out the best environment, they did stumble on one of the most famous effects in psychology.

The researchers thought that the low light levels inside the factory might be making the workers inefficient, so the first thing the researchers did was brighten the place. Worker productivity increased — but only for a little while. As good scientists, they also tried the opposite. To their surprise, darkening the factory floor also increased productivity. What was going on?

After a number of other experiments, the researchers determined the real cause of temporary productivity increase was change. Any change in environment produces a temporary gain in productivity. It matters not if the change is actually beneficial in the long run.

What causes this effect is still a bit of a debate, but one theory is that changing the environment made the workers more aware of their surroundings, and by extension themselves and their work, hence productivity increases. Once the workers familiarized with the change, the productivity gains disappeared.

Does this sound familiar? Remember how productive and organized you felt the first week after you bought your new computer or new phone? Remember how that feeling slowly disappeared? The Hawthorne Effect at work.

I suspect that much of the self-help industry relies, unknowingly, on the Hawthorne Effect. A new book about getting organized, managing your finances, or losing weight is able to generate enormous buzz because, for the people who try it, it works just long enough to get the book recommended. By the time the reader realizes that their weight has come back, their debt hasn’t gone away, or they are just as disorganized as before, it’s too late.

Just because the Hawthorne Effect exists doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t bother making changes in your life — it just means that it’s harder to tell, in the short term, if the system really works or not. You need to make deliberate changes.

Whenever you change something in your organizational system, or your life, beware the Hawthorne Effect and ask yourself several questions:

1) Does this change to the system actually make things easier?

2) Is this change less effort to implement than the previous system?

3) If it’s more effort, am I sure that it’s worth it?

Good luck with making changes, beware the Hawthorn Effect and don’t fool yourself.

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Header photograph by aussiegall