I've worked my ass off over the past couple of years. Classes need prepping and panel discussants were yelling for papers. That bitter taste of panic kept me moving. I'm moving to a new stage now. My courses require very little tending, and the semester is nearly over. I have two papers that need polishing, but nobody is yelling for it right now. That means that not a whole lot is happening around here.
I need to find a way of working without pressure. I have various schemes including writing a morning checklist of goals, living on more than caffeine and chocolate, combining my excessive e-mail accounts, taking time to go for a run. GeekyMom, who is just a step ahead of me, has been writing about her transition to working at home. I'll probably be doing more writing about this later this summer. Which would probably not be the best use of my time. Sigh.
Question of the Day — What routines do you have that make you more productive?
Apt. 11d 
I protect my focus by blocking time, turning off interrupts (e-mail accounts, phones, open doors), and concentrating on just one thing for two hour blocks. I set an interim goal for that block of time, but if I exceed my goal earlier than expected I just keep going.
I also recognize the fact that late afternoons are bad for me in terms of concentration. I specifically book certain low-level activities — meetings with HR, status updates, office hours — into the late afternoons because I know I’ll be worthless at anything else during that time.
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I wouldn’t call it a routine, exactly, but stopping to reflect on how much we pay for childcare and how much it cost me to spend the past hour browsing, say, defectiveyeti.com can really snap me out of it.
When I’m really distractable — which happens any time I’m trying to do a proof — I just disable my internet connection. Yes, it’s trivial to reconnect, but that 10-second barrier is all I need to discourage me away from the keyboard and back to my paper and pencil.
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Never start the day off with work email. You’ll be caught up in someone else’s priorities and not your own. Of course, limit the amount of times you check your email during the day.
Stop the ongoing writing project somewhere that it’s very easy to pick up. I leave myself a few notes about what I want to say next before I save the file, for instance. Another friend always stops in the middle of a sentence that she feels telegraphs to her where to go next (I’m not that insightful, myself!).
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I’m with Janice–never start the day with email. I had to really listen to myself about when I was more productive. Like jen, I can’t do much that requires real thought after around 2:00. So I save that time for exercise, housecleaning, or more technically-oriented tasks–tweaking web sites, for instance. I also give myself rewards–ice cream, a trip to Starbucks–for getting stuff done. And I won’t let myself do fun stuff, like play WoW, until I’ve gotten the important stuff done.
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I still don’t have a productivity schedule that truly works for me; I seem to go from one deadline to another. I hate the people who insist that their best work is always done under a deadline, because I read the papers by students who insist on this, and clearly it isn’t true. I know I would be a better thinker, writer, researcher, whatever, if I could schedule myself. But nearly a decade into this, I still struggle to find a reward system, or a block system, that I can actually stick with. Sigh.
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First thing you have to do is get dressed in the morning. It seems nice to work in your PJs but it’s harder to slack off in front of “the view”if you are wearing work clothes.
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Heh, I work quite well in my jammies. 🙂
In fact, I find the whole having to get dressed thing a disruption to my productivity flow.
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I have a lot of productivity problems, especially when I have a write a paper where the findings are not exactly coherent. I’ve already uninstalled solitaire, minesweeper, etc. I’d like to be able to pull my internet connection, but I’d lose the drives I need. I’ve also tried splitting the big task into lots of small tasks and found that this doesn’t work that well if you have to integrate the smaller parts at the end. Basically, without pressure, I’ll provide my own distractions (mostly re-re-formatting tables, but, most disastrously going on endless rounds of questioning the underlying methodology well after I should be in the write-up).
I had to resort to promising things to people with bad tempers/gobs of grant money to restore pressure to myself.
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