Recently I have been staying at a friend's house and he has been kind enough to let me borrow his car to be able to get around town a little more easily. This has been awesome for me, giving me a bit of extra freedom to get around the city and get to some things in just a few minutes that could take upwards of an hour by bike or bus.
However, this car is a stick shift, and a diesel at that. Though I started driving on a standard shifter, it has been several years since I have driven one regularly and I have never driven one that is a diesel. So after a few days of driving a and a few fill ups my friend shared with me that the car is getting about 25% less MPG than when he's driving. Essentially, I'm shifting really inefficiently, letting the car wind up much father, and in general enjoying the pep and fun of driving the car, but not letting it settle into it's normal rhythms.
In the same way, I've been finding a lot of inefficiency with shifting my mind. The last few weeks, I have tried messing around with my normal schedule. I've been putting my programing learning at the beginning of the day, trying to get in about an hour of learning and creative thinking at the top of the day. After that I was swapping over to my day job. It turns out, this is not the best idea. At the end of the learning hour, I'm psyched up for the day and on fire to do more programming, however, that is not my daily job. So I then ended up spending another hour goofing around trying to get my brain back into work mode and get things done. In the end, I was losing two hours of my most productive time and really only gaining an hour of good learning time. The process of shifting my mind from one mode to another was so incredibly inefficient that I was getting no where, fast. By the end of the two weeks I have shifted back to starting to work on my day job right off the bat in the day and trying to get learning in during the evening.
I'm still struggling with this, I'm missing a lot of days for learning, but I am way more productive and less stressed about "work". I have found a few tricks that help with the mental shifts I need to do in a day. The biggest one seems to be physical activity. Even if it's just an extra long walk on my way home from working at the coffee shop I seem to be able to very quickly swap mental gears and get a nice productivity boost post activity. The shift also seems to work well around meals. If I take a break to make dinner, post dinner picking up work again or swapping to learning or creative tasks is much easier. Now I like to think of these breaks as putting the car moving the car through neutral and disengaging the clutch before going into the next gear. The longer breaks, especially those with physical activity feel a lot like really double clutching, disengaging in neutral, matching the engine speed and taking off running.
So the take away this week is that if I'm wanting to get a lot done in many areas, using the necessary breaks in the day (working out, eating, even a shower) to break up those tasks ends up in a much more efficient use of the day and my energy.
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