March Goal
A selection of thoughts that have crossed my mind recently…
- I’m wasting time here but that’s ok I will get to the work later on.
- Why do I spend afternoons staring at my screen thinking I ought to work?
- I find it easy to get stuff done in the morning when I have other commitments in the afternoon.
- I don’t have enough time in the ‘after work’ hours to do all the things I want.
- I have no problem stealing leisure hours for work but feel guilty stealing back the work hours.
- I often keep going until I’ve finished something but then next time I start work I can’t remember what comes next. I might be better stopping in the middle of something instead.
The idea took hold that maybe I should experiment with shorter working hours and see if I could maintain productivity by being more productive in those hours rather than wasting them. So “done by two” is a goal to stop doing company work by 2pm.
I was experimenting with this last week before starting up a goal and it seemed a reasonably good idea. So I set the goal up today to run through the five weeks until the end of March. I was tempted to add some small print to allow myself a bit more freedom but decided to keep it as a dead simple “no work after 2pm” for a few weeks and see how difficult it was. I set it up to require 5.5 days/week, and with two days of buffer which gives me a bit of leeway without creating loopholes from the start.
Hilariously right after setting up the goal I went and fixed a bug I was sent at 1433. It took me seven minutes to locate and fix it but I had no way of knowing that when I picked it up. That’s definitely a failure and I’m going to keep track of them to see perhaps what the small print should be in future.