feng shui and phantom goals [12/05/2006 16:36:46]

I keep my TV in my room. It used to be up a wall, facing the bed, so that I could sit on the floor, lean back on the bed, and comfortably watch TV or play games for hours on end. One day I re-arranged the room, putting the TV in the corner and at an odd angle from the bed. Now I can watch TV from the elliptical machine, but sitting on the floor for long periods is uncomfortable. So now... Well, I don't watch much TV.

I made a similar change the other day to deal with procrastination. Answering thousands of emails can be kind of tedious, and I tend to get distracted surfing the web or otherwise procrastinating. I still have my "get back to work" greasemonkey script, but it's too easy to just turn it off. So I tried some very simple rearranging of the furniture.

First, I took my tablet PC (which I was using as a second monitor) and moved it over near the bookshelf. Now I can sit and read or just sit and think, and I can use the tablet as a tablet. If I'm going to take a break, I'd rather be producing ideas or working through my bookshelf than just mindlessly surfing through reddit.

Second, I took my comfortable office chair and put it in front of the midi keyboard. I haven't spent much time practicing the piece I've been trying to learn, mostly because I just haven't gotten around to it. But once the most comfortable chair in the house was right in front of the keyboard, I found myself sitting there practicing spontaneously.

The chair I put in front of my desk is one of those kneeling chairs. It's better for your back, but it makes my shins hurt after a while. The upshot was that I was a lot more focused when I sat down to work because I didn't want to sit in the chair for hours.

I wound up swapping the chairs back last night because I was doing a long programming session. I'm still sitting in it now.

Yesterday wound up being incredibly productive, which is odd because I was all over the map. I'm still dealing with a huge pile of email here, and I'm still dealing with them in batches with breaks in between. It's just that instead of wasting time surfing on the breaks, I was doing all sorts of little tasks.

Some things I did yesterday:

• Answered several batches of email.
• Began (the long tedious process of) cleaning out the mail queue one server.
• Fixed a bug in the way turcanator was displaying notes longer than one tick.
  
• Got python talking to CoreMIDI for output, so that I can actually make noise in addition to just receiving the midi events from the keyboard. With a few more minutes of work, the system should be able to play a selection for me, so I can hear how it's supposed to sound at the touch of a button.
• Dug up the old tangentstorm prototype and got it working again.
• Dug through the code for wxOGL and built a class diagram for it in JUDE
  

I know multitasking is inefficient, but I also know that my mind wanders and my work is a constant stream of interruptions anyway. In any case, being able to let my mind wander and work on whatever seemed the most interesting and doable at that moment sure made for a fun and productive day. One of the main reasons for trying to stick to one thing at a time is preventing myself from starting a million projects, but maybe constraining myself to 12 goals and just working on whichever one seems the most interesting at the moment can give the best of both worlds.

Which brings me to the list of phantom goals. One of my 12 goals for August is to increase my salary, which implies that I'm going to be doing some major work in my company. So that goal (plus a steady stream of various requests from customers) is causing me to come up with all sorts of projects and other goals within my company, such as moving toward a ticket system, or acquiring other small hosting companies, or working on this game tutorial / marketing effort.

I've been thinking of these things as phantom goals because... Well, they're not written down anywhere, but yet they seem to be generating a lot of work. I don't have any clear distinction between things that are good ideas and things that I've actually committed to doing in a certain timeframe, the way I do with my twelve personal goals.

So I wrote out a list of potential company goals - things that seemed most important, but also doable within the next year or so. For example, one major phantom goal that I've been carrying around for months is that I know I need to upgrade versionhost to support subversion as well as CVS, but I just don't see that happening anytime soon, so it didn't make the list. The most important business goals seem to be relatively small things I can do to improve cornerhost so that I start having more time to work on these bigger projects. Simple things like the tutorial for sales, a better knowledge base so it's easier to recruit help with support, and a variety of control panel improvements so there aren't so many support requests in the first place.

I'm not sure it's smart to plan out the corporate goals for a year like I did with the personal ones. It might make more sense to just have a top N list, and pick one or two each month. Sort of like the agile planning stuff in extreme programming. I'll have to think about this some more before I announce anything.