One 30-Minute Slice of My Day
I plan to try a few more of these, because any one 30-minute period can't possibly represent my whole day, nor can it reveal how I manage to fit all kinds of activities in (as Heidi asked about in her comment on my last post). This 30-minute period does reveal, however, how short my attention span is. I've said often that if something takes more that 3 seconds, I'm very likely to switch to something else—which, depending on what I switch to, can either be a productivity boon or a producitivity killer. Judge for yourself in this slice of Friday, October 17, from 4:27 EST to 4:57 EST. (I didn't write down the times of all the task switches, but I did write down what I switched to each time, so you can include "writing down what I did" on the list of things that I did. :-)
- Open enormous archive I received from an Ajax toolkit developer with 7Zip. Start extracting files. (Win)
- Upload two photos to Flickr. (Mac)
- Ping colleage on GTalk about whether trunk is open for checkins. (Win)
- Check on status of archive (still unzipping) and photo upload (still uploading).
- Add a folder to SVN with Tortoise. (Win)
- Add description and tags to Flickr photos. (Mac)
- Add photo to group pool, peruse group pool. (Mac)
- Check on status of archive (finished unzipping, but attempting to open unzipped folder freezes Windows Explorer). (Win)
- Engage colleague who's now responding to my IM. (Win)
- Check on status of add in Tortoise window. Complete. (Win)
- Check Google Reader for postings in the two Aptana forums I'm responsible for monitoring. No postings. (Win)
- Read latest TechCrunch post while in Reader. (Win)
- Refresh local SVN folders so I can commit files I just added; Windows Explorer freezes. (Win)
- Check latest tweets in TweetDeck. Nothing worth responding to, no comments to add. (Win)
- Explorer still frozen. (Win)
- IM from husband reporting on status of several things we have pending. (Win)
- Force-quit Explorer. (Win)
- IMs still coming in from husband, but otherwise, machine is frozen. Can't switch apps. (Win)
- Reboot Windows machine. (Win)
- Update NPR, CNN, and Slate podcasts in iTunes while waiting for Win machine to come back. (Mac)
I'm thinking I might slice my days in other ways, too; perhaps instead of writing down everything I do in a 30-minute period, I'll try setting an alarm that goes off every thirty minutes and write down what I'm doing *right at that moment*. I hope it doesn't reveal that I'm eating every thirty minutes!