I’m rediscovering the use of a blue SAD light for productive works/study time.
Also Newton’s cradle is good for setting a beat
Do the hardest, most disliked stuff first. Once it’s out of the way, everything else is cake.
ephedrine
I have ADHD, and if I really need to complete something I’ve been putting off for a long time, I will set a timer with barely enough time to finish it.
I have this nagging task on the computer? 5 mins, no excuses. Gotta cook real bad so I’m not eating junk food for like a week straight? Easy, quick recipe, 30 mins.
It works really well, but be warned not to use it very frequently. It can burn you out if overused.
I close the company-mandated interruption generator and only check my email hourly.
Email is the scourge of the modern office environment.
The senior execs are always braying about more productivity but refuse to turn off the pipeline blocker that is email notifications. (Honestly I think it’s a control issue.)
If it’s so urgent that it requires an immediate response, it should be an in person visit or phone call.
If not, let people get to it when they’re ready, and accept the fact that it’s not urgent.
Sometimes I swear half the fucking office building is just sitting at their desks repeatedly hitting refresh on outlook waiting for the other half to get back to them.
Anyone who wants to know how to deal with emails properly should read Getting Things Done by Dave Allen. It’s the reason why I (used to) get to go home on time every day while my colleagues grumbled about all the shit they hadn’t done yet (while still completing my full workload).
When I found that book, my workload didn’t change but my stress went waaaay down.
Since I refuse to have Teams and Outlook start on boot, I may have accidentally forgotten to open my email for 6 weeks… Most people just send me a message on Teams anyways.
Also, spam from HR. I am sorry, but your bullshit emails on senseless activities is not being read and immediately binned. The amount of spam emails I get from people in the company is astounding. At my old job I may have taken great joy in reporting each one of them as spam out of spite.
Structured brainstorming has helped me a lot. I have ideas for specific protects at completely random and arbitrary times, and they disappear if I don’t immediately lay them out. By adding a mind mapping app (MindNode, iOS) on my phone, I can quickly add new thoughts and ideas to my outline of a project in a way that’s easy to follow later, and I’m not wasting near as much of the time when I can actually sit down and work on trying to reconstruct those random thoughts.
I’ve done similar with my nonfiction reading. MarginNote also allows me to turn quotes and blurbs into mind maps quickly and easily, so I’m able to more quickly retrieve information when I want it.
If you search mind map, you should be able to find a variety of options. I can’t vouch for one specifically.
I did look to see if there was a multi platform app that similarly met my needs like MarginNote (to use with my ereader), but I wasn’t able to find anything I didn’t consider a meaningful downgrade. There are a lot of note taking apps out there, but none of them seem to work well as both readers and notes simultaneously. I haven’t done a deep dive yet, but there were a lot of “there’s not a good comparison” in other threads on it.
Edit: switched to the “framework mode” and showing the early version of working through marking the book up for real instead of the last version. The same thing can be switched to a mindmap with one click, but this feels better for this content:
I won’t show the content of any of it, but just to show the widget and that I actually do use the mind mapping for random projects that may or may not go anywhere:
