Grad Hacker

Photo by: Michel Filion

I’ve written a couple posts about why I think working on important stuff is a lot better for your blood pressure than working in context. In fact, slowly, I realized I didn’t really need contexts at all. 

One evening this week, I took a dose of my own medicine to great success, and I want to share it with you in hopes that this one data point will convince you that my entire philosophy is correct. Such is my master plan.

The Story

I live in an apartment building where if you’re not there to answer the doorbell when UPS arrives, they don’t leave the package outside, they leave a note and come back tomorrow between the hours of early and late. They do this 3 times then ask you to drive to their regional center many miles away. It sucks. That day, I had to run around the city during the day and when I came home in the afternoon, I saw no note, which means they hadn’t come yet, score! So I waited. and waited. Oh the holiday season when everyone is sending packages. Why the impatience? Well it just so happened that on that day, I had an evening meeting with someone for which I desperately needed to do some data processing beforehand. But I wanted this damn package. So I waited. And then I had this moment of questioning? What is this best use of my time while I’m stuck here in this unique contextual situation: waiting for UPS without my work computer when the most important thing I need to do right now is a specific bit of work?

I was antsy, I didn’t know what to do. I should do something right? I should make good use of this time. So the lure of next action lists arranged by context called. I don’t have those. I think they’re overkill. So I looked up my list and saw things I could do at home, with a computer, on the internet, etc. “Download such and such program and try it out.” “Clean bathroom.” “Make lunches for the week”. I was tempted to try doing some of those, because David Allen told me so, but I resisted. Really, it didn’t take much resistance. This meeting was important and all I could think of was when the m’fing UPS truck would show up, and whether I’d have enough time to process my data and get to the meeting. I started to worry. There was a lot of data. The processing would take time. I needed to plot stuff in a certain way. Even making the Excel spreadsheet for that would take time. And that’s when it struck me. 

The Idea

Let me do all possible thinking and planning and doing for this data processing that I can do right now with the tools that I have. That way, even if I hardly *do* anything because I don’t have my data, I can at least have thought of how I’m going to do everything and when I get to school, I’ll be speeding through the work with the thinking already done. And to top it all off, brainstorming exactly what needed to be done would make me worry a lot less while I sit here and wait. 

So I went to work. 

I whipped out a clean sheet of paper and started scheming. I’d put this here, plot that there, move that here. I then realized I could make the template for my worksheet on my crappy home computer, make the plots look better than that nasty theme Excel defaults to, tweak it, etc. I did that. I spent nearly an hour doing this. The template was ready to go. I emailed it to myself and then made a list of the tasks I’d do when I got to school in order. Waited some more. The UPS dude finally showed up. I grabbed my package, headed out the door, went to school, worked off my list to process data, used my handy dandy template I just made at home and made it well within time for my meeting. Money. 

Lessons Learned

If I had done “@home” tasks since I was stuck @ home, I would have had to spend an additional hour processing data at school. I would have also done my @home tasks poorly since my mind would have been on the looming important task. I would have had to suffer through a lot more worrying. Instead I was anal retentive on working on the most important thing at that moment and it paid off. What’s the lesson learned? If you’re going to be anal about something, don’t have it be on some esoteric productivity system that’s “so hot right now”. Let it simply be on getting important stuff done. Somehow, someway, with even as little as a blank sheet of paper and a pen, do something, on that which is worrying you most. It’s so not-cool these days to say it but it’s true: The most important thing you need to get a thing done is to do it.