Tools for Thought

One important faculty worth developing that gets overlooked is a tolerance for getting less done. That doesn’t mean setting a low level of accomplishment as a standard. It means making the most of the time or energy you have at your disposal, which will often be less than what you planned.

You expect to have an hour to work on a project. 10 minutes in, the phone rings, and you’re told that you have to attend an emergency meeting in 20 minutes. You can choose to either modify your time frame and continue working for that 20 minutes, or you can spend some or all of the remaining time cursing the powers that be for ruining your plans.

The same applies to energy. Whenever you plan to do something (that is, whenever you’re not actually doing it), you have all the energy in the world. At that moment, you’re not facing reality. As soon as you have to apply real effort to make meaningful progress, your best laid plans get tested. Sometimes you accomplish more than you expected, but sometimes it seems like nothing is happening — you’re just treading water. You know in your head that what you’re doing is the right thing, but your heart just isn’t into it at that moment. At that point, you have a few options.

Do a Ten Minute Dash

There’s a difference between being at work and doing actual work. In most circumstances, it’s convenient to blur the distinction. Sometimes we spend an hour “working” on something when much of the time is spent thinking about getting started or resuming. A Ten Minute Dash gives your brain explicit permission to do nothing for the allotted time, unless you consciously decide to work.

All you do is set a timer for 10 minutes and do either nothing at all or the task you set yourself. You’re not allowed any other interruption, not even music. It doesn’t necessarily have to be 10 minutes, but it should be long enough to be uncomfortably boring if you choose to do nothing. Usually, but the second half of the dash, your inertia starts to break down, and when the timer goes off, you don’t mind continuing — unless you do, in which case it’s time to . . .

Jump ship

You have plenty of things to do. Why settle for the one you’re resisting? Either find some useful ways to procrastinate, or find some other action on your list to do. Better still, find another to satisfy the Two Action Rule. Once you’ve gotten a couple of things done, check: Do you have more energy than before, or less? Giving your brain a couple of cheap wins starts a positive feedback loop, a pattern of accomplishment that feeds into the next task you undertake. See if you’re ready to go back to the one you avoided.

Use the talking cure

If you’re committed to thinking about your work instead of doing it, think out loud. Tell a coworker, friend, significant other, or captive stranger what you need to do to get your project moving forward again.

Two things can happen. You’ll either get feedback from the listener — a new angle, a better idea or a reality check — or you’ll experience a “working through,” where the process of directing your thinking outward increases your perspective, allowing you to unstick some problem that previously held you back. If you’re alone, chat people up online, leave a comment here or a more appropriate blog or forum, or email someone — even yourself (self-emailing is one of those tricks that’s never worked for me, but many people swear by it).

Unbatch

Needless to say, this contradicts the principle of batching. So be it — to everything, turn, turn, turn. There’s a time to batch and a time to split your efforts into more emotionally manageable lengths, especially at the beginning. If you need to get started on your dissertation, setting aside that first four hour session sounds like a great idea. Unless you start experiencing a sense of progress right from the start, it’s going to be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel if it’s four hours away.

Start with a much shorter session, like 30 minutes, or commit to a modest output quota, like 500 words (in the case of a dissertation, I’m assuming you’ve already done the research and outlining). This is similar to the Ten Minute Dash, except that you’re not necessarily imposing the same level of discipline. The Ten Minute Dash is designed to break your inertia with a self-imposed jail sentence (do nothing or write for ten minute). Here, you’re trying to sneak up to your energy level rather than challenge it directly. If it takes 90 minutes to write 500 words between tabbing over to Facebook and Gmail, that’s fine as long as you hit your quota. If you’re using a time commitment instead, and only have 100 words after 30 minutes, that’s fine too.

Add “extracurricular” time

I’m a big fan of “less is more,” but sometimes more is more. Sometimes you have to face the fact that you can’t “hack” your way out of ass-in-seat time. You’ll either get further behind or get fired. You just have to work with the energy you do have at an ignoble pace, and accept the fact that we live in an imperfect world.

What you can do to pick of the slack, even at the risk of being labeled a workaholic or getting arrested for breaking Parkinson’s Law, is find pockets of unused time to chip away at your project. This can actually be a very creative exercise. Create a checklist of five times during the day with 10 or more available minutes that you normally wouldn’t consider using. You don’t have the option of copping out and saying that you don’t have any time — you’re required to come up with at least five. Of course, you don’t have to use all five, but the object is to have options available for different times of day. You’ll want to keep this list for future reference, because when your energy is low, you won’t think of those times in your head.

What’s nice about these windows of time is that they’re generally short, and therefore, unintimidating. More importantly, you’ve already spent a large chunk of time working on the task, so these supplemental times happen after your brain has disengaged from the task for a while, giving you a second wind, and sometimes a fresh perspective.

Any others?

Sorry. I don’t have the energy to make this a “Top 10″ list of tips, so to flesh it out a bit, I’ll offer my last tactic: enlist the help of others. What are some of the ways you keep things happening when your energy is down?

(Photo credit: A Malchik)

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