General Thoughts on Time Strategies

Figure 1: Start Gun Pixabay

The advice in "The Importance of Just Starting" is a conclusion that I've found before, although their reasoning that the pain of non-productivity is greater than the pain of working is slightly different from my own, which is that deliberately beginning and focusing on a task is necessary for adequate concentration. Furthermore, although humans instinctively value short term immediate "advantages" over more long term ones, humans need to place their long term interests first to some degree.

I actually mastered this bit of advice when I was younger. I had a strong drive and could simply start and focus on a task. But now, I have trouble doing that. I think its because the path that I took didn't really result in the outcomes that I wanted, or maybe the goals I was aiming for weren't what I really wanted. I suppose the easiest way to lose the habit of pro-activity and self starting is to exhibit that behavior in a way that does not result in meaningful goals, like studying pseudo-science and realizing that all your effort amounted to nothing. I know that I can follow the article's advice because I've done it before, I just need to do it right this time around.

Figure 2: Checklist Max Pixel

I've generally found that when people give their most important life advice, they give advice that addresses their particular problems, generalizing their largest issue as the issue faced by most people. While there is a commonality between the problems faced by human beings, there is also significant deviation, and predicting the degree of deviation and commonality is difficult without relatively precise information.

I generally disagreed with the information in the second article that I read "The Psychology of Checklists: Why Setting Small Goals Motivates Us to Accomplish Bigger Things" . Before setting critical short term goals, it is necessary to learn to differentiate between small goals and trivial levels of progress. Furthermore, when dealing with any task of reasonable complexity and difficulty, it is not uncommon to make "progress" that is later revealed to be of no actual use to the larger objective. To state in more accessible terms, meaningful short term goals are actually quite difficult to establish, and the probability that the progression of a difficult project can be captured by a checklist is very low. However, if theses issues are overcome, then I expect that the advice in the article would be very helpful. I suspect that the article author has somehow dealt with these issues without realizing it, but as I have not, I cannot properly follow the advice in the article. However, reading this article has helped me properly articulate these ideas, so perhaps this is the lesson I should be taking. 

As such, I intend to force myself to start with more aggression than I have previously, both in this class and others, as well as learn to plan progression lists better and categorize goals better. Perhaps for this class I should establish a start time for each assignment and consider each assignment to be an short term goal. If you have ideas for smaller goals than that, I'd love to hear recommendations. 

And yes, I did just select the first two articles I came across; whenever provided a list of articles to select from, I just read them in order until the required number pique my interest.