Two I knew, and two I learned today
Our family has a lot of capacity for distraction.
To combat this, we’ve purchased several Secura 60-minute Visual Timers. They’re battery-powered and have a neat little transparent colored disc that shows at a glance how much time is left. (Full disc is 60 minutes, half disc is 30 minutes, and so forth.)
The ticking is also very quiet. Not at all like a cooking timer that can be heard ticking in the next room.
I have one at my home desk, and one at work. I’m getting into the habit of actively using them more, because they keep me on track.
I’ll share four ways that I use them to stay on track.
1. Set aggressive deadlines to get more done
I use it as a task timer to put a fire under my butt to get stuff done.
As I was drafting this article, I put 20 minutes on it to see how much of it I could get written.
It’s helped to push me in my daily writing practice. I’ve been writing 750 words a day for over 100 days straight now. In general I can pound out that many words without external pressure in somewhere around 25 minutes. That’s writing and not worrying a whole lot about form or structure for an article.
Twenty-five minutes for 750 words is 30 words per minute. That’s fairly quick composition I guess.
But I have dialed it down to 15 minutes, which is 50 words per minute. Had I not tried this, I’m not sure I would have thought I could do it.
I used the timer to push me along. Time-bounding a task is mainly what I use the task timer for.
2. Remember meetings better
More than once I’ve gotten immersed in something or other, and missed the start of a meeting at work.
When I can, I’ll set the timer to remind me of a meeting I need to attend.
I’ll set it to go off about 10 minutes before the start of the meeting. This gives me enough time to fuss with Teams and my headset, and get a quick sound-check when others enter the meeting. (I usually say “good morning” or “good afternoon” and wait for a response. For me this is more professional than waiting to be called on and saying “Can you all hear me?”)
Having the visual reminder in front of me helps me to reach a good stopping point on my work before the meeting. It’s also more effective and reliable than a reminder on my computer, since I may not be looking there when it happens, or I may be on a different tab.
3. Get started on an unpleasant but necessary task
A friend suggested another couple of uses today. Here’s the first one she shared.
This is a variation of the first way above, but for a different reason. It involves setting a short period on the timer to work on a task that’s being put off, say five minutes.
The task may be to collect the papers for a report that needs to get done. If it’s a task that’s easily doable within those five minutes, then (a) you’re going to feel good about it, (b) you’ll have started the task you’re secretly dreading, and (c) you’ll have momentum to continue it.
This trick helps to get over the “activation energy” of that need-to-do task.
4. Gently bring yourself back into focus
The other use she shared with me is using the timer as a mindfulness reminder.
She would set the timer for 12 minutes, and when it goes off, she’d ask herself if she was working on stuff she really cared about.
The idea is to catch oneself with the bunny trails that can inevitably come up in the course of working.
If things are off, then gently get back to the task at hand, and continue being productive.
A similar things can be done with an inexpensive Casio wristwatch (though people don’t wear those much anymore with smartphones and all). Those watches typically have an hourly chime. Turning this on and doing a mindfulness check when the chime goes off accomplishes the same thing.
One of a number of strategies for being more efficient with content creation
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Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash