In the beginning of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, 13 visitors invade the protagonist’s home. If they had all barged in at once, he might have rejected them. But they arrived one or two at a time. In small doses, the large problem was easy to accept.
As part of a website process, I started keeping track of both the accomplishments and the setbacks. The accomplishments included finalizing the home page text, debugging some PHP and running spell check. Some setbacks were so subtle that I almost missed them. But they happened, and the launch date slipped past.
My list showed that distractions were the chief problem. No single task was too difficult, but more important (or more interesting) things interfered. Call them anti-tasks: events or tasks that work against the final goal. They’re small, lasting a minute to half an hour. Phone calls were made, emails were answered, ideas about other work sprung to mind. Have you seen this video? That article sounds interesting.
Personally, it takes about 30 minutes to “get into” a job—half an hour to find the mindset, or change gears and become involved in the work at hand. Any distraction during that time is hard to avoid. But anti-tasks that occur after 30 minutes are easier to put off. Maybe that’s why I can do so much work after 1 a.m. and especially if I started working at midnight. Lao Tzu advises:
Confront the difficult
while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task
by a series of small acts;
avoid Twitter and email
and music with lyrics.
Well, my translation isn’t perfect. But that’s the idea. Now, what was I doing?