Priorities

My mind has a tendency to keep running down whatever paths it has started exploring. Even when I finish something, and move on, I continue to think many related thoughts. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that especially when I finish something and move on, I think about a lot of related thoughts. When I am working through an idea that I haven't solved, e.g. when I  am thinking about something to write that I haven't written yet, or when I am thinking about how to program something that I haven't programmed yet, my mind has a tendency to get stuck in repeat. Whenever I have a thought that seems good to me, my brain flags that thought, and it will keep returning to my mind every few hours or every few days until I finally do something with it. This has its advantages. I am able to remember many ideas for long periods of time, and to keep refining them in my mind before I use them without fear that I will lose the thought. It also has a major disadvantage, which is that my ideas can be distracting, and can keep distracting me until I finally do something with them.

My tendency to rethink ideas that I haven't used yet, which I'm guessing is a common tendency, greatly contributes to the stress of having something in progress, but not in continual progress. I'm always doing something and thinking about something. When I have a project that occupies much of my time without occupying all of it, it leaves me with other projects that also occupy some of my time without occupying all of it, which often leads to me continuously spawning new thoughts that I save until I use. Eventually, I start to feel like I have too many thoughts inside my head, and these repeated ideas start driving me crazy until I find a way to do something with them. One way of dealing with this type of situation is to develop opportunistic priorities.

My natural sense of how I should prioritize is to identify the most important things that I should be working on, and to focus my time on those things. This doesn't work particularly well for me most of the time. In general, the things that I consider most important are things that involve a lot of time. Working on them leaves my head full of all the smaller projects that I've also been thinking about. What I am gradually learning to consider a better approach is to look at how long I expect the various problems I consider important to take to solve, and to solve the fast parts first.

I'm slowly implementing this change in my habits. For years, I've been putting off blogging because I felt that finishing my first book was more important. Instead of writing about the single ideas that I could easily write about when I had them, I focused on writing out outlines for several of the books, I've wanted to write, and a far larger than reasonable number of opening chapters for a far larger than reasonable number of books. In retrospect, this has been stupid. It has been stupid for the simple reason that it gives me nothing to show for my work and for the more complicated reason that it has been a bad thing for me psychologically. More bizarrely, deciding to start each day by writing a quick essay to take care of one thought that's been turning over in my head has helped me significantly with my other writing. Switching over to a blog format for my essays instead of trying to keep them organized with my other documents and being tempted to collect them into larger works has also been an improvement at least in the past few days. (I've been interrupted a little bit more than I typically have been when I was simply writing essays mostly because I've been traveling, but in a particularly exciting twist yesterday because what I woke up wanting to write about was actually a piece of my book that had been causing me a little bit of trouble.)

I need to collect more data. I've only been following this approach for about a month, but my preliminary results are that in January, I had quite a bit of trouble with writer's block, that increased the harder I tried to defeat it, and since I've switched over to my current approach, I've not only been able to get one thought out of my head first thing every morning, I've also been able to make consistent progress on writing (and even harder for me, editing) the book I am getting close to completing.

Incidentally, going back to the concept I was talking about in my last post about time management, my episode of writer's block in January was onset by a significant interruption to my work. I was traveling and then I came down with a nasty fever that kept me bed ridden more so than any other illness I've ever developed, and then I had an important job interview while I was beginning to recover. I became non-productive for almost two weeks during this time, and after that, I had a lot of difficulty getting my wheels turning again. Jumping back into my existing project proved far more difficult for me at that time than just putting down other thoughts, so my decision to readjust my priorities was largely an act of necessity. I had one clearly designated most important project, but I was not making progress on it by simply focusing my time there. It was sufficiently important that switching to my second or third most important project seemed like a terrible idea. Part of the reason I've got so many projects started is that I've never had as certain of a designation of highest priority before, so it was always easy for the next idea (or returning to my previous idea) to seem more important than continuing to work on my current idea, but when I reached the point that I was three chapters and a few transitions away from finishing a book, with several well-polished chapters that I'd already edited when I was having trouble coming up with how to word my not material, that possibility seemed ludicrous. My only two sane options were to keep grinding away at something that seemed like it was going nowhere or to take care of little things that seemed unimportant but that I could easily finish and forget about. As the failure of the first option became increasingly obvious, I was left with only the other if I was looking for something that would work well. I'm pleased to say, at least for now, it is working.

I still believe in my overall thesis from a few days ago, very strongly. I'm not trying to contradict it, only refine it. I do think I need to have one major project that I work on as consistently as possible with minimal interruptions, but some interruptions (e.g. sleep) are inevitable. In these cases, when I have one short thing I could work on or my one big thing I could return to, I think the optimal strategy is to procrastinate the one big thing a little, so that I can get the little thing out of the way. Little means exactly what it did in the context of the previous essay. If a project is long enough that I think I will need to stand up to go to the bathroom or to eat something or do anything else like that before I finish, it's too big. That will just become one more source of stress. Those kinds of projects need to be deferred until after my completion of my biggest priority, but when the project is a single bite-sized chunk that I can finish and forget about and it is competing with my main project for my cognitive energy if I don't finish and forget it, I should prioritize the bite-sized project.

Since I like having a single tidy label to store my ideas under, I'm calling this approach to getting work done having "opportunistic priorities."