The Horizon

For a lot of people it is quite difficult to stay focused long enough to finish products.  I know for me, I tend to start something and then fall apart or lose focus.  When I am cleaning my house I tend to start in one room and then when I have to bring something into another room I begin cleaning there.  For cleaning my house, it’s not such a bad thing and I end up getting everything done when I want to.  But for more arduous tasks or tasks that I could eventually leave, it becomes a much bigger problem.

There are systems of organizing that require that you set a timer every fifteen minutes while you’re working on a project to keep you thinking and working on that project.  The difficulty of this style of keeping one’s self organized has some difficulty for people like me that tend to lose track of things quite frequently and often subconsciously on purpose (read: AD/HD).

The blog, Simply Stated, has got an amazing post about staying constantly focused on the task at hand. Instead of setting egg-timers or stop-watches in which the act of setting the timer requires self-interest in the pro-action towards the next 15 minutes (something that those with AD/HD can attest to), Simply Stated suggests using a snooze button on an alarm clock.

Move your alarm clock to where you’re doing work and set it to go off 10 minutes after you start a project. When it beeps, assess what you’ve done and then hit the snooze button. When it goes off again, see if you’ve accomplished more in the next chunk of time. Keep hitting the snooze button until you’re finished with your project. People who can hyper-focus will find this method really annoying and won’t want to use it. But, if your mind frequently wanders, this could be a great tool for you.

One thought that I immediatly had was to connect this with Dave Seah’s Printable CEO system.  With his system you can watch your work throughout the day which provides another level of analysis and hopefully will bring you closer to habituating the correct activities during your day.  This is especially true to his Emergent Time Tracker form.  I have used this form to some success but had problems–like I mentioned earlier–with constanstly setting a timer.

Some people may consider their alarm clock a very annoying noise and consider presssing the snooze button so regularly to be worthy of causing some blood vessels to pop.  Also, some alarm clocks do not allow you to set how long the snooze button will go off (I know that the alarm clock that I have only goes for 9 minutes).  To this, I would say that you should go out and buy a fairly nice alarm clock that has the feature of being able to set the snooze time.  The nicer alarm clocks usually have a better sound than the cheap ones which can tend to sound like a demon’s trumpet escaping from a cracked vent that leads to hell’s choral chambers (read: terribly annoying).

I will be attempting this technique as soon as I can get a hold of a nice alarm clock that doesn’t make my girlfriend want to murder me when it goes off in the morning. (Seriously, in a half-asleep state, I told her I was going to set my alarm clock and she started screaming at me, in the middle of the night, until I turned it off!)