Happy New Year / The Seven Habits of Mildly Effective People

The more astute of you may have noticed that there were no posts at all in 2010… I just didn't get round to doing anything on this. It's probably pretty much symbolic of how 2010 went in general - far too quickly for me to get a handle on anything. This was a year where TINWOLF appeared to nosedive, and where the world of my PhD continued to unravel, although on the flip side, make pla(y)ce had a wonderful 2010 with a series of fun workshops and performances culminating in a well-received piece for Light Night Leeds back in October.

Never mind, it's 2011 now. My New Year's Resolution is to get my life in order, and while it's easy to blame the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for everything, the truth is that I'm quite lazy, scatty and stubborn even without it. If I can overcome all these other things, it'll just be the CFS standing in the way of total global domination, and that's a far better place to be, I'm sure you'll agree.

Seven Habits of Mildly Effective People

I'm not sure I'm ready for all this self-help stuff (although I was contemplating the ISA Experience in the Autumn), but I thought I might start with trying to make myself at least mildly productive. All this "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" type stuff is all very well if you're already on the road to being a bit of a high-flyer, but if you're trying to reach a basic level of function it's probably far too advanced. With this in mind, I think I will start with developing some of the habits of mildly effective people and taking it from there…

1. GET UP

It's been nearly 8 years since I was doing the 9 to 5, and things tend to slip when you no longer have to get in for 9 o'clock every day. In order to be effective we need the time to be able to work (so getting in at 3pm when you have to leave at 5 is somewhat useless). Yes, Chronic Fatigue means being tired all the time, but a lot of people are tired all the time and still manage the 9 to 5, a relationship, a family, keeping the house clean, doing the cooking, doing lots of community and arts stuff and having a great social life. Everyone else manages it…

So time to stop being so useless, start getting up in the morning, and getting on the first step to being mildly effective…

2. SORT OUT WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO

There are a lot of ways of trying to sort out what you have to do. I've tried many of them and failed miserably. When I was at school, I used to keep lists of things to do. The ones written in red were overdue so needed to be done ASAP, and the rest were put in order of when they had to be done by.

This presents a problem nowadays… it's difficult to prioritise some of the tasks (except when "firefighting") and "do your PhD" or "make the world a better place" are large and nebulous tasks which are quite hard to split down into their component parts. Obviously, those are more like missions than individual tasks, and "go to the moon" was obviously split into things like "build a space capsule", "test your ability to withstand the g forces" etc. etc.

Sometimes I think of this stuff in the morning when getting up, other times I have kept "to do" lists on my calendar, on physical and on-screen Post-it notes, and on my home and office whiteboards. None of these seems to have worked for any great length of time…

There is another approach, called "Getting Things Done" which may work, but then again it might be more of a tool to help people who are already productive… maybe not procrastinating so much and finding out might be a better idea…

3. TRY AND FOCUS

Life is full of distractions… home has TV, books, the ability to use housework as displacement activity, and very occasionally a borrowed cat. Cats are the worst productivity tool ever.

Once the cat has decided to go and do something else, you still have the internet. If you work in an office with internet access, or indeed need the internet for work, there is also Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. Also in the office are other people to talk to. When I worked at Loughborough University, we wouldn't be so ridiculous as to spend our afternoons working, coming up with amazing insights or discoveries - no, we'd get together in our little Portakabin and spend the whole afternoon chatting, only leaving at about 7pm because we were hungry and wanted to go home to cook and eat.

So focus has hardly ever been my strong point. Perhaps it's time every so often to turn the internet off, leave the office behind and sit in a café being productive over a cup of coffee. This is something I aim to do more of in the coming year, especially as we're blessed with some quite nice cafés around the University of Leeds and Hyde Park (of which I'll probably say more on another occasion)

4. DON'T GET SIDETRACKED

Point 4 is a reminder that point 3 is very important.

Don't get sidetracked, stay focus, leave the cat alone (he's not even yours for God's sake), and there's no need to find out what's been happening on Facebook for the last 5 minutes. Leave it. Get something done.

5. REST WHEN YOU NEED TO

Managing Chronic Fatigue is partly about understanding when you need to rest and when you can work. I've never been very good at this. The solution to this is obviously not to strain to stay up when you're really tired, and to try and go to sleep at a reasonable hour (perhaps before 3.30am…). This is probably the flip side of point 1.

6. HAVE PROPER BREAKS

Knowing you're not doing enough work leads to stress, stress leads to not being able to relax properly and to not being able to take a break without getting worried about work, which leads to more tiredness, which leads to things slipping more, which leads to knowing you're not doing enough work, which leads to stress, which leads to not being able to relax properly, which leads to… well, I think you get the picture.

Being able to get work out of your mind occasionally, on a weekday (or even a weekend) should hopefully lead to being more bright eyed, bushy tailed and productive when you're supposed to be working. Just remember not to mix work time and non-work time.

7. LEARN HOW YOU WORK

Apparently, we all have our own sets of rhythms of when our best times are for working. Some people are better at working in the morning, some in the evening or even late at night. With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome you start off working whenever you can, then forcing yourself to work, and in the end abandoning the whole thing as a lost cause.

It's been suggested I keep a diary of my good and bad days. I have ignored those suggestions (along with a whole range of other suggestions which could have made me Mildly Effective™… As well as charting good and bad days, and attempting to work more on good days and rest more on bad days, an understanding of your circadian rhythm will allow you to be more effective by allowing you to (hopefully) regulate your sleep/wake cycles to when you can work better.

Developing the 7 Habits

So my own personal task over 2011 will be to develop these habits, and hopefully end the year Mildly Effective™ and, even more hopefully, on the first step to being Highly Effective (or whatever the current buzzphrase is). At that point I can start to think about reading about all these time management and personal effectiveness things because I ought to be in a state where I might be able to cope with one of them… but we'll see…