Chris’ Blog

Piggybacking on my post from last night I thought I’d share a website that was brought to my attention that I’ve used a bit at work.  Its called nowdothis.com The idea behind it is that you go in and setup a list of tasks and it gives you the first task on the list.  Its just a blank screen so there is very little distraction.  You hit the page and get your task, work on it, and then mark it done and you get the next task.  When you’re all finished it has a happy message about being all done!  Its quite a simple idea really but it can be a great help to keep reminding me what I’m working on (or supposed to be…).  I even experimented with having it in my side bar in firefox but I decided I didn’t need it to be there all the time.  The page serves as a great reminder of what I’m supposed to be working on if I think I’m starting to get off track.  There is no registration required and I think (not 100% sure) because it uses cookies and javascript you could actually pull it up and then go offline and use it so you could disconnect yourself from the web if that is one of your time sinks.  Go ahead and give it a shot!

Tonight I was given a reason not to multi-task and I thought I would share it. See I always have this problem, TONS of things going on all the time in my head. What this usually leads me to do is work on bits and pieces of a bunch of things. I’ve been trying to take some of Leo’s (from Zen Habits), as well as other’s advice and just pick one thing and work on it.

Well tonight this proved useful. Today was actually quite productive as I focused on one thing, got it done, and moved on. I just got back from a computer reset however. This interruption was quite sudden. I guess one of my drivers threw a stop error which shut windows down quick! Well this is where the working on one thing was a great help. First of all I didn’t lose any parts of things I had been working on because as I moved from one project/task to another I uploaded the files to the server. All I would have lost was a few minutes of work - so there was no fear about lost data when it went down. The other thing is I knew exactly what I was doing when it happened. I didn’t have to go open 12 files and remember what I was doing with each one. So, not only does working on one task help you move through your list easier, you have less chance of losing work!