Small Units of Time

I've become very good, over the years, at two things in particular: creating the space for myself to do deep, focused work on one thing intensely for a span, and batching/circumventing/streamlining smaller tasks. Alongside this, I've done a lot of work on cutting down on lots of 'time sink' activities like social media, Twitter being the lingering exception (though even that in phase).

I don't bring this up out of a sense of smug superiority, but because one thing that's left me with is a strange difficulty in spending small units of time. If I have an hour, I can get a hell of a lot done (and have probably planned in advance what that is going to be). If I have a bunch of smaller tasks on my plate, I can spend thirty minutes cracking through a bunch of them all at once, and otherwise, they can sit there until their time comes round again.

There are many reasons why this works for me (a lot of it I think comes down to activation energy and spending it as tactically as possible). The problem is, if I have ten minutes, I often have no idea what to do with it, or even lack the capacity to spend it happily doing nothing. My brain will be rifling through the things it might do and rejecting them due to 'not enough time' or 'too much risk of absorption. It's that muddy middle where to actually spend that time well would mess with where my brain is focusing and make it hard to move on.

To sharpen that last point slightly: I fear either starting-but-not-finishing a task and thus having another open loop to juggle in my head (see the Zeigarnik Effect), or getting so into it that I don't effectively break away, leaving me with a kind of cognitive inertia that tails me into whatever activity put the upper limit on that time.

'Doing substantially nothing' is an entirely fine way to spend ten minutes, and I am not very good at it. Once more, this isn't out a misplaced boasting around productivity and unidleness -- I consider this a kind of small liability, really, an unfortunate byproduct of other habits and systems that are actually good.

Folder Structures for Project Organisation

Knowing where to put things is invaluable. Having a sense of structure to where important information goes and my path to accessing it has been a tool that has paid incredible dividends over the past few years (if, indeed, a tool can pay dividends).

I've mentioned my writing advice folder on Twitter before; it's not something I can easily share for a ton of reasons, but knowing that that's where I file things like that and that that's a place I can go to get unstuck on problems is amazing.

Matt Webb's rules for blogging also shaped my workflow for these shards. I have a shortcut which prompts me to type an idea, which it then saves as 'IDEA [The Idea].txt' in my blog folder. When it's time to write, I skim the list for something that interests me right now.

Information in context.

I had a pretty good folder structure for projects already, but Antony Johnston's system from The Organised Writer helped take that to the next level.

My 'Projects' folder is synced through Dropbox and pinned to Windows Explorer. Here's a (redacted) snapshot of the top level:

The next layer down is slightly different for all of them, but broadly has a 'stages of the project' structure:

‘Games’

‘Fiction’

The next level down is the individual projects. Here are a bunch of short fiction things:

I can move projects between 'stage' folders depending on their status. This has secondary benefits for things like selective file syncing on my laptop. But most of all: I always know where to find something.

I also have a template of 'useful folders to stick in any new project', which are: Archive: Folders or files that form part of the project and I want to keep around, but which I don't want to actively surface when looking for information day-to-day. (In long-term projects with more complex file structures, individual folders might have their own Archive, e.g. [Project Name] > Design > Archive.)

Materials: Stuff I have been sent about the project. Usually limited to 'stuff I have received from a client or collaborator'.

Press and Praise: Save nice things people say about your work! 'Press' is a more obvious element -- if I think is out and receiving attention. But even just if someone says something specifically nice about something you did on Slack, save it. You might never be able to do anything external with that, but if you're having a bad day, it's nice to be able to go and look at those things.

Project Management: Everything related to organising the project. Especially: contracts, statements of work, invoices, remittance advice, timesheets, your log of work. I cannot overstate how useful it has been for me to keep all of this in one place per project. Having a specific place for that info makes it easy to file it routinely, and knowing where to go looking is 👍👍👍.

References: On smaller projects, I often collapse this with 'Materials', but if you've got a lot of external references, here's a good place to list them, store copies, or link out to them. Might be duplicative with a moodboard, etc. if you're using it, but link out to that if not.

Generally, actually, if I have stuff on the web, instead of using brower bookmarks (though I will if I access it, like, daily), I save web shortcuts into the folders. Same if there are other project-relevant folders which need to live outside of Dropbox, like a local repo copy. Everything I need for a project is in one place.

Noisedialling

Social media, messenger apps, and notifications in general are a massive drain on my sanity and attention. That's almost definitely true for you, too, and odds are you either rationalise it as a necessary evil or have stopped noticing.

I've been very intentional about how I handle this problem for years now. It's probably made me difficult to deal with in some capacities (though I've also had comments on how it's changed other people's expectations around communication into a more positive mode). What I've found is that, while less noise is usually better for me, that's not universally true.

I've pared back what spaces I'm actually present on and participate in -- e.g. I've been off Facebook since 2018 or so. That's something that I have almost no qualms or regrets about, but I do notice the lack of a 'stable' (for a given value thereof) social network that's been constructed diachronically over the course of my life (vs spaces that have grown around a single interest or career). But I'd say that's still been almost entirely a good thing.

In practice, I often turn off or bury notifications from the messenging systems I actually use (e.g. WhatsApp and Discord), so that I have to go the them rather than having them come to me. There's a flipside to that, which is that sometimes (particularly when co-ordinating with someone or expecting to hear back on something), that leads to compulsive checking of those apps which is far more stressful and distracting than a push notification. That's usually a sign that I need to turn up the noise for a while. I could write a whole post of how I approach siloing off email, but that's for another time.

Rather than treating noiselessness as an end goal, I've come to regard it as something that happens in phase. Sometimes, I need to be in a high-noise state (active notifications, Twitter on phone if necessary, less use of focus modes) and at other times in a low-noise state (suppress notifications, no SoMe on phone or ideally at all, phone almost perpetually in a focus mode). The practice of switching is also useful, beyond the recognition of having multiple states -- the contrast of moving from one to the other makes each more effective, and feels like I've given myself another lever of active control.

That's all it's about really: living intentionally and modulating my signal and noise as required.

Personal Energy Budgets

I've been thinking a lot lately of 'energy budgets'. Not, I hasten to add, anything to do with energy-as-in-power-as-in-electricity generation and its current pricing crisis. I'm talking about personal energy – our available energy to get up and do things.

Spending a lot more time watching animals has also sharpened this thought process. It's a reductive way of seeing the natural world, but a very clarifying one. Many (most?) animals devote huge amounts of their lives to acquiring food -- their principle source of energy. It's interesting to view any action an animal takes through what it costs them and what it gains them in terms of energy.

Here is my current working model:

1) Energy = Attention + Time. The biggest discordance for me comes from wanting to do something and not being able to. It often feels like a function of pure time, but that's not true -- I have lots ('lots') of time, but more often lack the spare attention to do what specifically I want to with that time.
2) You need to be generating more than you're spending. In the longer term, at least. In theory, everyone has a personal threshold of activity beyond which they're draining their reserves rather than replenishing them. Which is okay in the short term, but is fundamentally not sustainable if that's the way you're living as a matter of course. Add to this that working above that limit means that you're not only not generating energy, you're spending more of it at the same time.
3) Rest and leisure is an active process. Broadly conceiving of rest and leisure time as being what generates energy and of work or work-adjacent time as consuming it, you need to be... actually putting the effort in to do rest and leisure well. They are not purely passive time in their conception, and not all versions of them are created equal. I also find that, when I'm getting overwhelmed with work, I rapidly lose my ability to adequately benefit from downtime, which leads to a feedback loop.

Making Timeboxing Work for You

One of my absolute most powerful tools for getting things done is timeboxing. This one is well-known and well documented, so I make no claim to novelty on this, but that's not what this space is about (recall Matt Webb's 15 rules for blogging #6: Give up on saying anything new. Most people haven’t read my old stuff. Play the hits.).

Here's an abbreviated list of ways I deploy timeboxing in my day-to-day.

• Fixed Schedule Productivity. Cal Newport's term. The idea of being rigid in your daily working hours, meaning you start and stop at specific times (almost) no matter what. The idea being that you get more done if you take away any tendency to extend your working hours (because, for instance, you haven't been effective enough during the day). Worked brilliantly for me as a freelancer and I consistently tracked more high-quality work hours in a shorter period.
• Paper Schedule. I've seen this one in a few places over the years. Every morning as part of my morning startup routine, I prepare a paper schedule where I plan out what I'm working on that day and when. I make this with reference to my calendar and task management software, and try to consistently allocate appropriate amount of times to different things (which makes me better at estimating task durations). Paper because the act of preparing it is important, and it has an air of impermanence and flexibility. This is also where I decide whether this is a deep, lossy, or hybrid day.
• Pomodoros or other sprints. Pomodoros are mostly a measure of last resort for me now, but I do longer 90- and 60-minute sprints on deep work days, using some of the same principles. The ideal is that they're spent working intently on one thing for a fixed period, with any excess time spent overlearning, but I keep things more flexible than that when I need to. I use the same principle in my morning routine, spending a fixed period of time working on admin, stopping when the timer goes off.

Several threads that run through all of this:

• Being intentional about my time. Making proactive decisions about what I'm working on and when, being realistic about how much I can fit in, and developing and reinforcing the knowledge over time of how long it actually takes me to do different things.
• Parkinson's law. 'Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.' Giving yourself a constrained period of time to complete a task makes it much more likely the task actually gets done, usually without any material compromise in the quality of the output. (But also remember Hofstadter's law.) There are limits, obviously. You can't time-hack your way to writing a novel in an hour. But as you develop a clearer sense of how long different tasks actually take you (which requires being intentional about your time, see above), you can also hone a sense of where the lines are that meaningfully impact the quality of the output (Will a novel I take a decade to write be better than one I write in a year? Almost definitely. Will it be ten times better? Hard to quantify, though it feels doubtful. Will it be better than the combined output of writing ten novels in that same decade? Unlikely.).

I've fallen into a rough habit of three posts a week on here, targeting Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which I'm aiming to maintain. Next week will likely be quiet, though, as I'm away at an event.

Morning Startup

Increasing my capacity to do things and actually exist successfully has mostly been a practice of building a Operations Manual for myself. For instance, having a specific morning routine to shift into work is something I find both emotionally stabilising and immensely practical.

Right now, I actually perform that by getting to my desk at a specific time each day (currently an hour before I start my day job) and running a batch file on my desktop which creates a dated copy of a checklist template. Then, I work through that checklist, deleting lines when they're done.

This features a mixture of self-focused things ('meditate, or do a functional equivalent', 'read for at least 5 minutes') and practical, forward-looking things ('look at your calendar and task management software and write your daily paper schedule', 'fetch the physical files and books you know you'll need').

Once this is done, I shift into another protocol for cracking through my comms and admin. This is another batch file which opens a bunch of tabs and windows. I set a 30 minute time and just work through each, closing them when I'm done. The end of that time is spent working through the Trello board that contains all my admin/admin-adjacent tasks.

When the timer goes off, I finish up what I'm doing, and stop. Then, I usually have enough time to make a coffee before starting the day job.

The batch triggers are the key here -- doing them as a matter of course. That way, the content of each can vary (I changed out my morning checklist to better match my current day-to-day), while the fundamental habit remains.

Energetic Reserves

While I started my new job a few weeks ago, I banned myself from working on any side projects for a given period. It's unheard of for me to not be working on about five things at once, but I've been overstretched for the past while and in a cycle of energetic depletion, so this was a sensible step.

A week or so ago was the first time in a while where I felt very aware of having the surplus of time and energy to work on things. Usually, the mismatch is between my impulse to work on things and the available time and energy, so this was a good sign -- though I'll continue sitting on my hands for a while longer, as I want to actually feel like I have reserves of energy.

I realise also that what I'm doing partly is replicating my feeling around a longish holiday where I'm travelling -- something I did rarely before the pandemic, and haven't done at all since. While I'm all for relaxation and travel, I do find that, after about a week at most, I'm itching to have sit-down time at a desk to at least get all of the things out of my head. Returning to my office with that sort of energy -- where I'm desperate to get out the gate and moving -- has always been a good feeling when it's happened.

Things I do to enable focused work

Things I do to enable focused work:

• Shut the door
• Noise cancelling headphones
• Turn off my computer's clock display + set an alarm instead. (This isn't always the right call if pacing out your work over the time available is important, but for extended periods of work, it helps me get lost in it.)
• All devices and channels off-noise
• Make sure I'm adequately provisioned with tea and water (though not so much I need to pee every ten minutes)
• We have a smart doorbell. I have deeply mixed feelings about it, but it has been fantastic for my focus -- the principle thing that used to keep me from being able to get lost in work was expecting a package and knowing that I might miss the doorbell with headphones on. (In practice, this never happened -- but either leaving the headphones off or being vigilant to any slight noise I heard through them wasn't productive.) This sends notifications right to me that punch through Do Not Disturb and I'm not afraid of missing.

Time Models

Last week, I moved back into a full-time, in-house role. I left my last such job in 2018 (before I actually moved into games/was writing and designing full time). This has meant an interesting shift in my working practices.

When I was freelance, I managed to structure my time to maximise 'deep work' -- being able focus really intensely on a thing for an extended period. I used to use Pomodoros -- sequenced 25-minute chunks -- but now find these too short unless I'm having an attention crisis.

Now, 60 or 90 minutes at a stretch is good, interspersed with slightly longer breaks. I developed a routine designed to maximise the number of these I could get in a single day, and found that to be extremely efficient. I never measured it, but my intuition is that I could achieve in one of those spans at least as much as a 50% longer chunk of less focused time, and with much greater consistency and enjoyment.

Now, that whole structure was based on a few factors specific to my working reality, including:

• Not requiring frequent real-time collaboration
• Limited number of meetings
• Steady backlog of larger creative tasks that benefit from deep work
• Material circumstances permitting a proverbial (and literal) 'closed door' approach

It's also... quite tiring. Periods where I ran that schedule five days a week were exhausting and not what I'd consider sustainable. Three or four days a week with the other days structured differently were the sweet spot for me.

Shifting back to being an employee, I'm not expecting that to work out precisely the same way. My responsibilities are different, I'll need to do more collaboration, and it's just straightforwardly different working in a company. BUT my previous approach was so effective and valuable that I don't intend to discard it altogether, either.

Here's where I've landed so far. I expect this to evolve over time.

• Recognise the different roles deep and lossy working time play. One is not strictly superior to the other; it depends on the task, role, and material circumstances.
• Be explicit about what sort of 'time mode' you're in
• Accept that you can't plan this as far in advance as you like. BUT still make it a proactive decision to avoid being wishy-washy. When I'm assembling my schedule at the start of each day, I decide which mode I'm in, and plan accordingly.
• Right now, I've got three working modes:
  • Deep. Much like my old schedule -- go offline and work intensively for planned spans, and check in outside of them.
  • Lossy. More fragmented. Task- and context-switching are still undesirable, but flexibility and ongoing communication are prioritised over singular tasks.
  • Hybrid. The day is split half deep, half lossy. Recognise the switch and roll with it.