Maintaining Momentum and Inspiration

By ian

One of the things that I figured out at SXSW is that I’m horrible at maintaining inspiration and momentum in a project. In many projects, I start off strong, but have a tendency to lose focus as the project progresses. In an effort to help better maintain momentum in my current projects, I’m trying a few new things.

Keeping 15% Free

It’s never a good idea to run a computer with a completely full hard-drive. It’s best to make sure that you always have at least 15% of the drive free. In many ways, this is true for people. If you’re too busy thinking about other tasks, it will be nearly impossible to stay focused on the task at hand. This is my biggest problem and I’ve been trying to think of different techniques to keep that 15% free.

Most of the things that clutter my mind are new ideas. I’m constantly thinking of new projects I want to start or events I want to organize. In the end, most of them are bad ideas. In order to improve my efficiency, I need to do 2 things with these ideas. Determine if they’re any good and get them recorded so I can think about them later.

To help me determine if a project is a good idea, I’m using Dave Seah’s PCEO tools. I’ve been using the emergent task tracker off and on for the last year. I’ve even attempted to make some software tools based on the PCEO that I could give to Dave, but that’s one of the many projects I just ran out of momentum with.

To help me get the ideas recorded, I’m going to start keeping 2 things with me at all times: a sketchbook and my camera. This also means that I may have to start carrying around a bag of some sort, but I think that I can find something manly enough to avoid ridicule. I may add more items to my bag o’ inspiration, I’ll post them here.

Reducing Distractions by Scheduling

After clearing up some of my mind clutter, the next task is to reduce distractions. My distractions come in 2 flavors: chronic and acute. Chronic distractions are things that I drift to repeatedly throughout the day and just linger. These include my feed reader, my blog and Flickr. Acute distractions are one-time distractions usually initiated by somebody else; usually through IM or e-mail.

To help with the chronic distractions, I’m going to set aside time to focus on them. These activities are important and I can’t just ignore them, but if I set time aside at times when I’m normally easily distracted, it won’t really be impacting my work. I’ve also tried to trim some of the bloat out of my feed reader. I’ve realized that almost 70% of my new posts came from only a handful of feeds and most of them were useless. Feeds like TechCrunch, CNN and Slashdot usually don’t provide much to me, but they do take up a lot of time. Again, I’m going to be using one of Dave’s PCEO sheets to help track where my time is going,

Avoiding acute distraction is a bit trickier. I can’t really shut down AIM or e-mail because they’re my primary means of contact with co-workers. One thing I’ve been thinking of is using a 3 minute egg timer to limit IM conversations. If I’m still talking to a co-worker through AIM after 3 minutes, it’s probably worth it to just go over and talk to them in person. Chances are the conversation will move more quickly if I’m not spending half of my time waiting for them to type.

Getting the Damn Book

The final thing on my list is buying a copy of Getting Things Done. It seems like every productive person I know references it on a regular basis, so it’s probably worth reading. If it’s as great as everybody says it will be worth it.