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Automation

by corwinolsonPosted on Posted in Personal Growth, Productivity, Technical Tips, Time Management — 2 Comments ↓

Most people I know do some kind of work that requires at least a few repetitive tasks. Odds are that this applies to you as well, to some degree. And a lot of those repetitive tasks you perform can be automated, if you are willing to figure out how to do it. However, most of the time it doesn’t seem worth the effort to do the automation, especially when you first start a task and you are facing a looming deadline. You say to yourself, “I only have to change these 20 lines, and then I’ll be done. Why should I spend so much time to automate a task that won’t take that long to do manually?”

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Using small windows of time

by corwinolsonPosted on Posted in Personal Growth, Productivity, Time Management — 4 Comments ↓

Back when I was in high school, I had an important realization about time management and getting things done. I would often have only a small window of time, like 30 minutes or less, to work on some particular homework assignment, or some project, etc., before I had to go do something else. The problem was that these assignments always seemed like they would take far longer than the time I had available, and I would think to myself, “If I start now, I’m not going to be able to get it all done today, and I’m going to have to expend so much more energy starting and stopping than it would take if I just went straight through!” As a result of this thought pattern though, it would often be quite a while after the assignment was given before I would start large projects, as I never seemed to have a large enough block of time to get it done.

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Emptying your inbox

by corwinolsonPosted on Posted in Personal Growth, Productivity, Technical Tips, Time Management — 1 Comment ↓

Until recently, I would regularly keep 20 or 30 emails in my inbox as reminders of things I needed to do. So there were 20 or 30 emails that I knew I needed to act on, yet I would need to think a little about each one to remember what it was I had to do.

Then I came across a few articles online that hailed the benefits of completely processing your inbox down to zero emails. One of my favorites was at zenhabits.net. At first I thought, “That’s not possible for me. I don’t know how I would capture all of the different action items that I have in these various emails, and I like having easy access to the email when I want to work on that task.” But another part of me said “well, let’s see if I can figure out a way to do it, and see if I like it.”

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Mental Momentum

by corwinolsonPosted on Posted in Health, Martial Arts, Personal Growth, Productivity — 3 Comments ↓

Often times when you are first starting a task, it is easy to get overwhelmed by how much energy it is taking to do even the smallest aspects of the task. You wonder to yourself, “If it’s this hard to do less than 1% of this task, how am I going to make it through the entire thing?” When I start to think this, I try to remind myself of the concept of mental momentum. If you can sustain a decent level of effort for an extended period of time as you get started on a particular task, you will develop momentum that allows the process to become easier and faster as you progress, and this momentum will make it much easier to continue working. This concept spans many different types of activities, from exercise to homework to a big assignment at work.

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Writing things out to better understand them

by corwinolsonPosted on Posted in Personal Growth, Productivity, Technical Tips — No Comments ↓

Have you ever attempted to read through a challenging document (technical or non-technical) that presented a lot of material you struggled to understand? Examples include textbooks, technical papers, legal documents, insurance information, etc. I have found that one of the best ways to comprehend dense material like this is to write it out.

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