Martins Blog

When I went to bed yesterday I spotted David Allen's book GettingThings DONE next to my bed and given my current state of not having a job and thus having no tasks in my schedule that are labeled for work, I figured it is the perfect moment to read that book again and implement his model using my favorite tool - Emacs.

When I first read this book and tried to use the information given I was really overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities and numerous "yeah, that's absolutely logical, of course I'd do that like this"-moments. Because of the universal applicability of Allen's methods, he often referred to file cabinets and folders as well as computer aided support for organizing information and tasks. That's where my previous attempt crumbled, there was too much I wanted to have, too few things available and eventually too many places that held information and relevant things in it.

Later I discovered Emacs and a lot of my day-to-day life changed due to the enormous power of this piece of software. Thinking back to GTD I also looked for similar approaches of other people who did implement that method in Emacs and of course org-mode is the key feature provided by Emacs that allows an easy implementation of this method. The first source I stumbled upon was Org Mode - Organize Your Life In Plain Text! and of course following the worg section of http://www.orgmode.org there were many other references, like Charles Cave's article/tutorial, all of which provided a lot of inspiration for my own implementation of the GTD method.

<2016-04-05 Tue>

Lately I find it really hard to stay focused on a workday. When working on my projects at work, there are downtimes e.g. when test-runs are performed. Also I feel like I am not using creativity to doing my tasks at hand, after all I am a programmer and still I am performing more monkey work than thinking creatively.

First off, what am I doing on downtimes? Well, there is 9gag, golem or heise for light entertainment and news, more so browsing youtube for content I currently like takes up more time than I would like. For example videos on Emacs, fitness, stupid stuff or even games are those that show up on my suggestion list after a week of not deleting my browser cache. Even though these videos do interest me a lot, sometimes I really feel like I am wasting a lot of time there.

As an example for monkey work there are these highly repetitive things I do instead of writing simple scripts that would do the trick as well. I think my main problem here is the lack of reflection, thinking about what could be improved.

So to keep this devastating topic rather short a few suggestions what to do from now on:

• No more youtube or 9gag as they really do take up a lot of time with no benefit at all.
• Use downtimes for reflection, is there anything in my workflow that can be improved?
• Before starting to work on a task (e.g. preparing the latest milestone release) take some minutes to plan ahead what I am about to do and simply ask "Can something on this plan be improved?"

I think with this there is a good chance of improving my work life, creating actual time to spare for good things, like learning new skills or reading up on the latest news.