15min: Developing good habits
The items I've started tagging with 15min are part of a scheme I came up with last Tuesday for developing good habits by breaking never-ending tasks like sorting receipts, reducing clutter, and managing my websites into little (nominally 15-minute) pieces. The hope is that I'll do two or three every day, and so far it seems to be working. Another hope is that these things will become habits along the lines of taking my drugs, doing the laundry and dishes, and tracking things in my to.do list. The third hope is that I'll spend more time actually doing things rather than glumly and guiltily staring at my to.do file looking for something to do or, worse, looking for things I've already done or have long since given up on. There are a surprising number of the latter.
15min tasks are loosely categorized into "buckets", with the idea that I'll pull tasks out of two or three different buckets every day. As tasks become firm habits, some of the buckets may disappear -- for example, there are no buckets for paying bills online or doing dishes, because I'm pretty consistent about doing those. (There's no bucket for taking walks, even though I'm not very consistent about it, because those have been tracked separately for a long time and somehow don't "feel like" 15min tasks.)
The current list of buckets looks like:
- Decluttering. This was, of course, the original meaning of the tag. (Thanks to thnidu for reminding me of this post.)
- Receipt sorting: sales tax, income tax, healthcare, etc.
- Paperwork: taxes, mostly, though it also includes canceling services, triaging the to.do list, and similar things.
- Check writing: unlike regular bills, which are paid online, this includes charities, subscriptions, and other things that only get paid infrequently. I hate writing checks.
- Web hacking: updating the website, fixing the makefiles, writing tools... It's not unpleasant, I just forget to do it.
- Music: recording, practicing, writing and updating lyrics files... I sometimes need to be prodded to do fun things, too.
If you're following the "raw notes" section of my done posts, you can expect to see lines like:
* 15min: declutter the office, mainly the left-hand pile.
I won't usually mention them in the narration unless there's something unusual to say about them.
Before you ask, this is just something I came up with on my own; it's unrelated to Flylady, Getting Things Done, 42 Folders, or any other formal structure; it is, however, influenced by what my friends have been blogging about, and a moderate amount of web-reading.
Comments are, as usual, welcome.