How I did it: I found if I wasn't being honest with myself, I was doing things I really didnt like doing.  And in short, this chewed up time from entertaining myself or working on interesting projects.  And this started a vicious cycle, to make up for this, I'd use the time I was meant to be doing productive work to entertain myself and then I'd never get anything done, it got into a vicious cycle.

So I realised that I had to get the boring tasks out of the way, e.g. completing uni so I could work full time doing what I wanted was one of them.

At work, its getting the boring operational tasks done first - but also not letting them get in the way of time spent doing the interesting work.

The biggest enemy of interesting work is urgent distractions.  I find if you can share the load with others then the urgent distractions become less problematic.

Lessons & tips: The other thing I did was track my time, I found a neat program called

Manic Time that tracks what programs you use, websites visited, etc.  It

allowed me to assign time to tasks I was doing, and I could track my

whole previous days work.  The information that surprised me the most

was that I took shorter lunch breaks than I thought, and was staying

back at work feeling guilty for no good reason thinking that I hadn't

done enough work for the day.  It turned out that I had, and that having

this information, I felt in control because I could also identify and

justify the distractions that prevented me from reaching my

commitments.  Its much easier to explain to someone you are going to be

late when you can say exactly why and when you were held up and have historic information to predict future availability.

Resources: Manic Time

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Feb 05, 2010, 05:36AM PST | 0 comments | 1 cheer