Some see no difference between tasks and appointments:
“A task and an appointment… both need your time and your presence.”
– Work Clean, Dan Charnas, p56
To this end, many recommend scheduling some of your tasks. Some even go so far as to encourage scheduling all of your tasks.
For some, this can work very well. With a calendar, they pin a start and end time to the work at hand and engage. Others use the Pomodoro Technique, an often useful productivity technique to engaging work in 25 minute blocks of time.
Users often feeling relief:
I know that during this time, I can spend my attention here and not there…
Unfortunately, this approach fails for some people, including me.
Something about it feels too arbitrary. Creative work in particular is difficult to estimate with any accuracy. The inevitable interruption of a creative sprint is frustrating. And, the effort involved in forcing myself to stay with something is energy I prefer keep in reserve.
Beyond these concerns, there remains an obvious difference between tasks and appointments.
An appointment involves another person.
Particularly for those with wandering minds, this can make for a major difference. The fear of letting someone down, the desire to connect, among a multitude of emotions and beliefs create a new universe. Such vastly variegated worlds form any time another person enters the picture. In fact, entire branches of psychotherapy focus on the power of relationship.
When another person is not there, the sense of agency can take on a more malleable, if not fluid nature:
I’ll do this, then that, oh wait, this looks interesting, oh I’ve been meaning to do that…
Other times, harsher internal tones sound off, often paradoxically leading to greater paths of avoidance.
I can’t believe I’ve let this go on for so long! I feel too terrible to do it just now. I need to get in the mood first…
Further, by scheduling something on the calendar, a “Will I not do it again?” can now flow by undermining confidence with yet another pass.
A time set on a calendar creates a force. Again, sometimes this can be useful.
But for those of us who at least unconsciously know that it is not a real reflection of creative work, it lacks the sense of reality needed to gain traction.
To truly return our sense of agency when working on our own, we can instead consider a new measure of work, namely a Visit.
Rather than force ourselves to complete some amount or pass through some arbitrary time window, we can begin the practice:
Show up and then decide.
Certainly, a visit is only a beginning, but beginnings are powerful.
– Kourosh
PS. To learn more of the Visit, consider any of the following posts:
- The Visit and the Waves of Focus
- “I just don’t wanna” and the Power of a Visit
- The Visit and Reaching the Edge of Action
- Your First Step to Breaking Free fro Force Based Work (PDF)
PPS The Waves of Focus course is a system of productivity that centers on the Visit as the unit of work, creating an entirely novel way of addressing work and play, whether that is about things that are due, or things that are fun.
