Having Free Time

I Googled across an interesting article about productivity and priorities.  It presents the case studies of a few people who impose upon themselves a fixed schedule. They decide that they will work during a fixed set of hours—let's say, for example, something like 8:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M., Monday through Friday—and then they don't waver from that.  These are people whose lines of work would otherwise influence them to work long hours; for example, my current profession, graduate student, is one such profession; I have to set my own schedule, and I have to produce results from said schedule.

In my experience, there is a lot of pressure to work long hours.  It stands to reason that the more I work on something, the better I will be at it.  I can think of many people in other fields for whom this is the case; Michael Jordan, famously, dribbled a basketball around with him everywhere after he was cut from his freshman basketball team tryouts.  When I was a high-school wrestler, I was told the story of Dan Gable, who after winning the national championship in his weight class, instead of celebrating, was seen that very night jogging, preparing for the next big tournament. The book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, talks about the 10,000-hour rule; people who are masters in their fields typically have put in at least 10,000 hours of work to become masters.  I have been taught, either directly or indirectly, that one must work tirelessly to rise to the top of one's field.

The article I have linked makes an interesting point.  By forcing themselves to be constrained, the people in the article put themselves under pressure to do the most important and most efficient tasks possible.  It was interesting to read how once people implemented a fixed schedule they actually improved their overall production even though they were now working less hours.

I am going to implement this idea and see how it works.  It is definitely something I need.

Addendum:
The story of The Fisherman and the Businessman seems appropriate for this topic.

Riskopoly

I am a fan of board games.  Some time ago, I came across rules for a game called Riskopoly.  Here is a set of rules.  The game is essentially both Risk and Monopoly at the same time.  Players gain money from their Monopoly properties as well as their Risk territories in order to buy armies.  With these armies, players try to conquer the world.  I have never played this game, but I would be interested in trying.  The major hurdle is that since both Risk and Monopoly are notoriously long, such a game would be even longer.  It is a tall order to find people who would be interested in making the time investment necessary to play this game.

If I one day complete a game of Riskopoly, I might try next Settlers of Riskopoly.

Also, I wonder what other board games could be combined to form even better games?

Projects

As I was working on one of my newest projects, I peered over at my bookshelf and noticed a book I bought to work on another project which I had long since abandoned. I realized how often I start ambitious projects to improve myself in some way, only to abandon them once the demands of every day life get to me. My new goal is going to be to stick to my projects.

I make this goal with one caveat: I need to pick projects which are absolutely the most important and best uses of my time. Virtually every ambitious project that. I can imagine is a "good" use of my time. Some of these projects are better than others. The key for me is to figure out which projects are the best uses of my time. The ideal is for me to identify this early so that I don't have keep quitting something that I started.

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Anki

I recently installed the Anki app to my phone.  It is a flash cards app.  I have used flash cards off an on in the past to help learn languages and memorize scripture passages.  They have helped me learn things but they were a hassle because

• If I was making flash cards for vocabulary, I didn't want to waste a whole 3 by 5 card on one word.  I therefore cut 3 by 5 cards into fourths.  I then marked each side with a distinctive color so that I knew which side was the front and which side was the back.
• If I was making flash cards for long passages to memorize, it took a long time to write out each passage.  Some of this time was useful because it helped me learn; however, I feel that I learned faster once I had the card and was free to give my full attention to the memorizing task.  Also, handwriting long passages led to the occasional error, which means I ended up memorizing some things slightly incorrectly.
• I did try printing out these passages, cutting them out, and pasting them onto a 3 by 5 card, but this was still a bit of a hassle.
• The advantage of flash cards is that they can be reviewed while one has a spare moment--e.g. while walking to class, while waiting for some kind of appointment to start, etc.--but the problem is figuring out where to stash them.
• The biggest issue was that I had a hard time trying to organize a regular review of my cards.  I didn't have a good way of figuring out how to balance studying new cards and reviewing old cards on a regular basis.

Anki is better in all of these issues.

• I can create cards by copying and pasting things into the computer and then loading it all onto my phone.  It's quick and easy.
• I just have to carry around my phone, which I do anyway.
• The program is set up to keep track of how much I have reviewed each card.  Each time I see a card, I can input whether I thought the card was "hard", "good", or "easy" and the program will set that card for review based on my self-assessment.

I have been using it for a couple weeks now, and I really feel like it is helping me a lot.  It has been a great study tool.

Productivity, 2 Weeks Later

I blogged about productivity about two weeks ago.  In said post, I said that I would check my progress in two weeks time.  Here is what I am seeing.

• I have the hardest time remembering to do all of the simple little things I ought to be doing every day.  What has worked for me during these two weeks is keeping a to-do list.  I got a to-do list app for my phone which I have been using to keep track of everything.  I have small daily tasks repeat every day.  Every time I think of something random that I ought to do, or that would be good to do, I put it on my to-do list so that I make sure that I remember it.  My progress on this front has been satisfying.  I have had a virtually perfect record on my small daily tasks, and I have taken care of a lot of one-time tasks that either (1) I had put off for a long time or (2) if I hadn't had written them down, I might not have done them.
• I still have a lot of room for improvement, unfortunately.  Obviously it is not realistic to expect that I can solve all of my problems in two weeks.  However, I have been inspired by the good things that I have been doing lately and have set a few more goals to improve.
• I feel better when I do what I am supposed to.  I feel like doing what I am supposed to for an extended period of time will give me a lot of personal strength.  We'll see how I am doing in three months.