Following up recent posts about things taking longer than you think.
Trying to do cleanup, laundry, and organization before starting my next task? I predicted “a few minutes”. It took a bleeding hour.
I need hours at a time to get coding done. I need focus.
I don’t need to be interrupted by rescuing a cat from the rain!
But you have to anyway. Argh!
Time tracking (I use Clockify), if done pretty rigorously, can really dispel some illusions about how much work we can get done in a short amount of time – and, conversely, about all we did do in that block of time that didn’t feel productive.
Case in point: I’ve already done 6 hours of stuff today that wasn’t on my agenda for today. And all this stuff “needed” to get done – at least for a normal, human interpretation of the word “need”.
I feel the need to qualify that as I’ve been through cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), an evidence-based approach to dealing with stress, and while it is wonderful, it does have some intellectually dishonest components, like throwing out “need” language.
I get it — there are things we think we “need” that we really don’t — but some of the therapists I worked with pushed that to an extreme that didn’t make sense. Sure, you don’t “need” to breathe, but if you don’t, you’ll pass out and/or die.
So, yes, the stuff “needed” to get done in the normal, human sense of the word. I mean, sure, you could throw out all your clothes instead of doing laundry and order new ones online, but that would neither be efficient nor sustainable.
But more directly, some of that was organizing my files for my current active projects, some of which I did indeed need to pull up and organize in order to take the next steps on those projects.
Funny how our busy-beaver selves sometimes try to convince ourselves that certain things don’t “need” to be done … but if we don’t do them, we won’t get anything done.
Or the cat will have to stay in the rain.
-the Centaur
P.S. And this post took another 15-30 minutes, as I came back to it later.
Pictured: the bottom coming out. It was short, but it was a hell of a rainstorm.
