For a couple months now I’ve been doing a “40 Minute Thing” as a way to manage my time at home working on the various projects at home I want to work on. Basically it is a simple thing. I work in 40 minute segments. Once I start a segment, I try to work on that one thing and only that one thing for 40 minutes straight without letting myself get distracted by anything else. At the end of the 40 minutes, I take a quick break, then if there is enough time, I start another 40 minute segment. Repeat until out of time. If for whatever reason I get unavoidably interrupted in the middle of a segment, I pause the timer and then restart it once I get back on task.

More specifically, I have an order in which I do what I do. Each evening, the first 40 minute task is email. The second is doing financial stuff… paying bills, entering receipts into Quicken, etc. The third has lately been genealogy stuff, but I have recently switched this to being a random selection from a set of about six other tasks ranging from cleaning to reading to playing chess. If I finish all three of these then I repeat and start at the top again.

In reality, on most weekdays I only ever get in the first segment. Some weekdays I get two segments in. It is a very rare weekday when I get in three. But on Saturdays and Sundays I can often get in two or more cycles of three items.

I find giving myself this structure at home ends up in me being a lot more productive than leaving the time unstructured. It has helped me a lot in getting things done. I have felt much more productive since I started this, and I have a good daily gauge of how much I’ve been able to do… just could how many 40 minute blocks I managed to get done.

I haven’t yet given myself quite the same sort of structure at work. I think it might be useful though, so I am thinking about it. Just have to get an appropriate timer in there. (At home I use an OS X Dashboard Widget.) Problem is, at work the day is so punctuated by meetings and random interruptions that it is harder to do the same methodology. But certainly on days when there are long uninterrupted stretches it would help.

Without that sort of structure two things tend to happen with me… they are somewhat opposite, but they both happen depending on what else is going on.

#1) I get focused on one thing and spend too much time on it to the exclusion of other things that also need attention.

#2) My top priority task is one that for whatever reason I am mentally procrastinating, and so I bounce back and forth between that task and other random tasks of lesser priority, and the primary task gets less attention than it should.

The 40 minute method… or any length of time where you force yourself to focus on one and only one thing for a length of time… plus the rotation through types of tasks that need to be done… solve both those problems quite nicely.

So I’ll probably try it at some point. So far though it has been easier to execute at home. And I am very happy with it.

I haven’t posted every time there is one of them, but earlier today Amy had another performance with the Seattle Children’s Chorus. This time was part of a festival with a bunch of children’s choirs and choruses from all over the area. This picture is when they all sang together at the end. Amy is one of the ones in light blue.

Back on 2006 Aug 15, Greg made this post on his blog:

Don’t think he won’t reply

Where “he” is Sam.

Back in April (I guess) I posted a blog entry suggesting that either I didn’t know anyone who works at Google or if I did, I didn’t know that I knew anyone who works at Google. Sam dropped me an email (and commented on the post) to confirm that I do, in fact, know someone who works at Google.

Today, Sam responded to my reply:

(Greg then quotes an email I sent to him)

At the time I tried to respond to Greg to explain my current email system, but his comment system was not working that well, so I ended up emailing myself the comment I wanted to post on his site at 2006 Aug 17 19:16:44 UTC. I now post it here:

I have been known to answer emails over a year after they were sent to me. My email backlog a few months ago was such that the oldest unanswered email was indeed over a year old. As of now, the oldest unanswered email I have is one my mom sent me on March 27th (of this year). I will answer that message in a couple weeks probably.

My current system has three tiers.

Each day I try to answer all the emails from the previous day (UTC) that can be answered quickly and do not require me to take any actions, or think overly hard. Any email that does not get answered the day after it was sent goes into the second bucket.

That is my main email inbox. If I finish answering the previous day’s email, I start at the top of the inbox (sorted from oldest to newest). Anything over one month old does not get looked at, but rather gets moved to an “OldMail” folder. But once I am in emails that are less than a month old, I start answering them. Now, these are all emails that for whichever of the reasons outlined above did not get answered the day after I got them, so they often require me to do things or think a bit, so they take longer to deal with.

I have one message in my inbox from myself that tells me it is time to look at “OldMail”. When I get to this message I switch over to the OldMail folder and start answering my old mail from there. These are once again usually messages that take longer to answer, although some are still left over from before I started this current system, so are shorter ones. In general my target will be to empty the OldMail folder every time I get to this task, but since I had a huge backlog earlier this year (several thousand messages) I have just been getting it to 100 less than the last time I did the task. So for instance the last time I did “OldMail” (a few days ago) I got the OldMail folder down to 500 messages. Next time I have that task, I’ll pull it down to 400. When I have gotten to my target level, I reply to the message to put the task back down in my inbox for a later date. Also, an important note, if the OldMail task gets to be over a month old it does NOT itself move to OldMail, because otherwise I would never look at OldMail again.

And that is the system.

Note: This does not account for Spam, I deal with Spam with an entirely different, yet similar, system. I currently have over 50,000 messages in my spam folder that have yet to be reviewed to confirm they are really spam and pull out the ones that were mis-identified as spam by my filters. I get about 1 in 500 false spam identifications, so there should be about 100 real messages stuck in that 50,000. When I find them, I place them in the appropriate one of the categories listed above for real mail.

Of course, I am now posting this because I have just now reached that message I sent myself as I continue to follow the method I described.

It has been so long since I posted one of these, that new readers (those few I have) may have no idea what this is. Starting around when I left Pittsburgh to head to Washington, DC to try to find a real post-college career rather than the random stuff I was doing in Pittsburgh for a little while after graduation, I started compiling and sending out an “email top ten list” each month based on which of my friends had sent me the most personal email the previous month.

Basically, the main purpose was as a mechanism for me to keep in touch with people. If people fell off the “top ten” and stayed off for a few months, I’d notice that and email them. But in the mean time, the “contest” took on a life of its own, even though there were no prizes. People would actively try to win in some months. When several people were trying in the same month, this could sometimes be a little annoying… people would do things like sending me 5000 separate emails each with a single word in it and such. (By the way, emails I suspect as automated have always been disqualified, so these would have to be manually done emails or at least be good enough automation to fool me.) But it was still fun. And it did result in lots of email, and with keeping in touch with people. And sometimes even to make new friendships when people would discover the contest and start sending email.

All the previous results can be found here and a retrospective of the first 100 months of the contest can be found here.

Then in October 2004 there was a meltdown on my email server, and I lost several weeks of email. Which through me into a real tizzy, cause first of all, I lost email and I’d kept in one form or another every email I’d ever sent or received since 1993, but second because it made putting together the count for both September and October of 2004 very difficult.

Anyway… for a variety of reasons, doing the reconstruction got put pretty far back on the stove, and literally I’d only do a few minutes of work on it each month. So there has been a 28 month delay in putting out the October 2004 results. Oops.

But they are finally here! Click through below for the details and the winners:

October 2004

But after the disastrous email meltdown of October 2004, which caused missing data in both September and October of 2004, I was so disheartened. I tried my best with the September info, but I was still late. After that, after being late for the first time in the history of the email top ten, it just seemed to be of little point. Once it was broken, it was broken. So I continued to work on the reconstruction of the October 2004 email results, but rather than just spending the hours straight through to get it done, I did a few minutes worth each month. Sometimes an hour’s worth on a good month. But I let other things take priority. I should have made this an absolute priority from the beginning. If I had done that, this quite possibly would have been complete shortly after the September results, but I did not. There were a lot of other things going on these past two years. But with a little bit done each month… and a bump in priority in February 2007 so I did a bit each day instead of a bit each month… we are finally at the end of that road. The October 2004 Top Ten is done!!

Over the next few months I’ll slowly be calculating results from November 2004 to the present and then resume the normal schedule for these things. Since these will just be normal counts of existing mailboxes with no issues, these should go pretty fast. I’ll still space them out some rather than do them all at once. My only goal in terms of that is to release them at a rate faster than one a month so I eventually catch up. Hopefully in less than another 2+ years.

As I write Amy is missing a sleepover for the Middle School girls at her school. She is very upset about that. But with a fever over 100 degrees for the third straight day (or is it fourth now?), that just wasn’t going to happen. Two nights ago her fever briefly spiked to 104, and based on the advice of her doctor and Brandy’s mom (a nurse) she was about to be stuck in the Emergency Room for the evening if it didn’t come down within the hour or so. It did, so no ER. But we’re still in a “sick” mode. Temperatures are less than they were, but still often over 100. Meds would knock the temperature down a couple degrees, then they would climb up again over the next few hours until it was time to take more meds.

There is a nasty flu sort of thing going around school. According to an email that went out yesterday, about 10% of the students are out sick right now. The email was pleading with parents to please keep their kids home from school (and the sleepover) if they seemed like they were getting sick, so as to try to keep the other kids healthy. Of course, even at her sickest Amy was pleading to please go to school. She really likes school. Which is good. But with those 102 degree fevers and the like… no.

One of the other kids who is very sick is the other girl who was at the mall with Amy last Saturday and who slept over that night. They are thinking she’s gotten a pneumonia type thing out of it as well. Fun. We think Amy caught it from her last weekend but no signs of pneumonia yet in Amy.

Amy’s still sick but getting better. Hopefully her friend is getting better too.

Brandy has been off and on running a fever too but mostly managing to keep functional. I haven’t yet… but I fully expect that within the next few days I’ll be struck down too. Once this kind of thing gets in a house, unless you’re really lucky, everybody ends up getting it at some point.

Urgh. I just coughed. Here it comes! :-/