Reverse Snooze-Buttoning
So I often have to do stuff that I really don't want to do. But the sad truth of grad school is that it's really not possible to phone anything in-- you have to be there mentally or you're just wasting time. And one of the little tricks I've come up with to get things done against my brain's wishes is a trick *I* call reverse snooze-buttoning.
How it works is this: You set your alarm (I use my cell phone, but whatever you got) for say, five minutes in the future. When it goes off, write down what you're doing. (With the intention of doing productive work, of course) Then hit the snooze button, rinse and repeat. What you may or may not being doing in the interim is irrelevant. If you can manage to do one second of useful work between snoozes, then ok. But me personally, I don't multitask that well, so having this little timer keeping me honest gives me
a) a short-term goal (hang on eight minutes for next snooze thingie)
b) a really good way of getting into the groove, since the groove is where you need to be anyways
(I also watched Randy Pausch's Time Management lecture, which had some good little nuggets in it but had some extremely skippable parts as well.)
Ok, I got to find a decent California Cab for wine club now.
How it works is this: You set your alarm (I use my cell phone, but whatever you got) for say, five minutes in the future. When it goes off, write down what you're doing. (With the intention of doing productive work, of course) Then hit the snooze button, rinse and repeat. What you may or may not being doing in the interim is irrelevant. If you can manage to do one second of useful work between snoozes, then ok. But me personally, I don't multitask that well, so having this little timer keeping me honest gives me
a) a short-term goal (hang on eight minutes for next snooze thingie)
b) a really good way of getting into the groove, since the groove is where you need to be anyways
(I also watched Randy Pausch's Time Management lecture, which had some good little nuggets in it but had some extremely skippable parts as well.)
Ok, I got to find a decent California Cab for wine club now.