Focus

I struggle with focusing. Although most projects of me that I consider successful are the result of focused work, I spend a lot of my time not focusing, but trying to work on many things simultaneously, which is something I am not very good at. And then there are times where I am not doing anything in particular, but actually I am trying to learn something.

I don't say that I don't like to play, to read blogs and to discover new things, but I do dislike to realize at the end of the day that I've done nothing else. I want to accomplish quite a few things, but I need to focus to do that.

With that out of the way, I'd like to talk about how I am going to improve the situation. I do that both as a writing excercise and as a reminder to actually do something. (Note: I consider writing a form of productive work and writing this article sparked that I did something feeling inside me, so I consider writing this a good thing. :)

Distractions

Usually, I have about 5-15 tabs open, alongside of that at least 3 terminal sessions running (a university project, email and various projects of my own, usually), an instant messenger, often a pdf viewer and probably and IDE if I have to use it for university.

That probably sounds not like much, but it still distracts me. Because most of the time I only need one or two of those things and I actively want the rest to not get in my way, which it currently does.

I haven't analyzed my statistics about my usage patterns, but I suspect that I spend most of my time in very small timespans. most of them are smaller than 15 minutes, probably as low as 5. I seldom spend more than 30 minutes on one thing continuously, but I also think that the "successful" projects are the result of focused work over periods of at least an hour.

Also, when I'm switching, it's likely that I change to something unrelated and thus loose focus. I isn't even deliberate all the time, but having a browser session with many distractions one click away isn't o, ...

What's missing?

There are at least three thing missing from my current workflow: Conscious decisions about what to do next, separation of the different projects I am working on and reflection after I finish working on something.

I need to make descisions because I need to know what I am working on. To seperate the different projects will help me focus on one thing, because when switching it is likely a conscious decision. And I need to reflect on what I did because I need to judge whether I was successful and what to better the next time around.

Going forward

I need to implement solutions for these problems. Probably the most important part is the reflection, which is precisely what I am doing right now. Naturally this is also the input for the descision about the next thing to work on.

Yet, I need a tool to help seperate projects. I'll try some of the existing ones and will report (reflect :) later.

For later reference, here's my list of things to incorporate into my workflow:

Decision

Seperation

Reflection

PS: What do you do?