Today being a Monday I thought I might reinvent my life in some way – you know, just to keep on top of things a little bit. No, seriously, I’ve felt my work (research, teaching preparation) veer a little drunkenly off course of late, so it seems important to figure out ways to get them back on track.

I’ve always found ye olde to-do list pretty useful, and I’m certainly back into using those (TaskMate, for those keeping score – it has the benefit of being extremely simple). Still, having a big list of to-dos (and some semblance of “next action” doability ala Getting Things Done) doesn’t actually solve all of my issues with, uh, getting things done.

The key problem I have, even when I’m more or less in the know on the tasks I have, is that I futz. I know I’m not alone. My potential work hour is usually really about 40 minutes or so because I insist on reading the 5 new feeds in Google Reader, or on looking at my email, or making a cup of tea, or whatever else isn’t the work I’m working on. Pretty boring, typical problem, but when I think of the time I’ve started losing it starts feeling a bit debilitating.

So today I went back to another one of those tried-and-true techniques: recording what I actually do. Amazing. I had my computer announce the time every quarter hour and wrote (honestly) what I’d done for each one. Now, obviously that means that for once I actually know what I spent my time on, and that’s all well and good. But the real benefit is almost entirely the hyper-awareness that this introduces about my time. In other words, the fact I’m going to be writing down the things I did for a quarter hour makes me want to make sure I spend the quarter hour on what I was actually meaning to do. It raises my defenses against distractions by making them explicit.

So, yay for that. It does work, even though it could be a bit of a soul-grinding experience for many.

Having given a presentation at an HCI meeting this evening, I’m thinking about my whole relationship with public speaking again. My relationship is one based on fear and anxiety. I dread talking and I’m normally convinced, beforehand, that it’ll be terrible.

And yet, when the time comes, and my name is called, I stand up and deliver a perfectly adequate talk. I don’t stammer. I don’t lose all sense. I don’t forget what to say. I’m fine. Not necessarily a searing intellect or a great entertainer, but fine.

But the next time I’m slated to give a talk, I’ll feel nervous as hell again. I wish some mystique-filled, white-haired old man would sidle up to me and say, “all the great ones get nervous, son, and you’re no exception.” Or something.

Tonight I just want to pay tribute to the majesty that is Joe’s Goals, above.

Well, it’s more the very fundamental concept of making lists of things you want to be doing every day, and ticking them off.

This, in turn, stems from advice from Jerry Seinfeld I read about on lifehacker talking about the importance of building a chain of having done things, and that the power came in not wanting to “break the chain.”

This, in turn, stems from, I think, Benjamin Franklin’s virtues project, in which he did something similar, except with virtuous behaviour instead of writing poems and so forth.

The upshot of all of this is that, by using the Joe’s Goals interface, and by following this idea of building a giant chain of doing productive things I want to be doing in my life day after day after day… I get those things done. Day after day. And not wanting to break the chain turns out to be massively powerful, as does the continuous reinforcement of seeing the chain growing.

I may be going overboard with the crosswords, though.