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Friday, February 12, 2016

Another Way to be Productive

Here's something else.

1. Don't measure productivity in terms of hours worked. (In the industrial sense, if you permit my crassness, productivity is not hours worked, but how much is produced per worker per hour. It is efficiency. To measure your output by how much you've worked is opposite of how you should be thinking.) Rather, what you should be looking at is getting things done.

2. The basic unit of time you should think about is the day. You want to increase the number of days per week in which you do something significant on a major project. Doing something significant might be starting a chapter, writing a substantial number of words on it (500-1000), having a single lightbulb type idea that represents a significant breakthrough, submitting an article, finishing something, giving it its definitive form.

So if all you do on your major project on any given day is one of the above, then you are making efficient progress. Today, for example, I began a chapter, and it is only 9:30.

2 comments:

Leslie B. said...

Yes, but I still like to reserve certain hours for these projects. It doesn't mean I follow them always, but setting the days up so that I have them sets an intention and keeps priorities straight. This goes with your other post, about rules.

When you walk into the studio, which you should do at the moment your rented hours begin, you should first assemble all the tools you will need and put them in one place. Then wedge up the clay. These things need to be automatic, non-optional, not up for debate.

Anonymous said...

So, today I did this. Mechanical work on the finished part of the article, and research / conceptualization breakthrough for the rest of it. It took 6 hours.

My brilliant schedule for the semester: 1 hour research/writing MWF and 5 hours TT, for a total of 13 (I want 15-18, but would take 13, I had said), with weekends off, is not working. I seem to have 6 hours each SS, for a total of 12.

At least some of this has to be pushed back into the week, you do not get as much done in 12 hours over 2 days as you do in 12 hours over 4, for instance.