Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Some tasks don’t deserve a lot of time to complete, despite how much time I would like to devote to them. I find items that limit my time on task.

Some tasks are worth only so much time. Regardless of how much I like the task or how much I feel the tasks deserves (at the time), I need to cut them off. I don’t like this, but I find ways to live with it.

For example, each morning I “view” the Internet. I put the results in a daybook or notebook. I use the Google RSS reader to look through over a hundred web sites. I would enjoy doing this for several hours, but that is too much.

I limit my morning Internet to one hour. I use a parking space to enforce the limit. I view from a coffee shop in Reston Town Center. There are parking garages available that have all-day parking. There are also parking spaces on the street that have a one-hour limit; I park in the limited spaces. No matter how interesting I find the day’s events, I have to finish the task and leave before my car is towed.

The one-hour parking space limits my Internet viewing.

Other time-limiting mechanisms include:

• Start a task at 11AM and end it by lunch
• Start a task an hour before a meeting and end it by the meeting
• Start a task while a meal is cooking and end it when the food is cooked
• Start a task a little while before my grandkids arrive at my house and end it … well you know

Silly tricks? I concede that these are tricks. I am not ready to concede that they are silly as they seem to work and keep me moving on to the next task.