It’s been a while since I had a post about improving my efficiency. Mostly, I’ve just been trying to stick with my cyclical schedule where I don’t get to pick what I’m working on next, and that’s been working well. Just trying to make that process more frictionless. It’s not that exciting to talk about, but reducing friction is important. And hard.

Before I get into that though, I wanted to restate the goal of all this. The goal is not to be able to do more. I forget that sometimes. Instead, the goal of improving my efficiency is to minimize the actual time I spend doing this stuff, so I can spend more of it with friends and family and, ya know, things that matter.

* * *

So on to the friction. I’ve got this simple system. To recap:

• I keep a list around of my pet projects.
• Each project in the list includes some notes about what I’m currently working on.
• Whenever I sit down to work, I look at the top of my list and work on that project, doing whatever it says in the notes I should be working on specifically.
• After 30 or 45 minutes, or when I’m done with my current task, I write down what I need to do next for the project I’ve just been working on, and move the project to the bottom of the list.
• If I have time, I repeat this with the new top-of-list project; if not, I just skim my notes for it so I know what I need to work on next time.

The point of all this is, I don’t waste a lot of time or energy trying to decide what to work on next; I don’t have a choice of what to work on next. I just go through the list. This works pretty well, when I actually do it. Trouble is, I don’t always do it.

Sometimes, when I sit at my computer, I just want to play a game. Or check up on news. Or I may have to do work for my regular job.

So the first thing I did to make things run a little more smoothy was to add games and news and job to the list, so I manage it all just like everything else. In some ways, this makes the act of relaxing with a game feel like any other chore, but that’s kind of the point. If I’m working so much that I feel like I need to stop in the middle of everything and do something mindless, I’ve failed to manage my time well. Those breaks need to be a preemptive maintenance sort of thing, not emergency damage control. Scheduling video game breaks in forces me to, well, take breaks regularly.

* * *

The second thing I’ve done is keep my head a little emptier. I’ll explain this by way of a tangent.

When programming for the Apple II, there was this concept of the Zero Page. It was a tiny, tiny section of memory — just a couple hundred characters’ worth of data — that you could access very quickly in your programs. So while you had much more memory that that total, you wanted to make sure that the things you’d be accessing the most frequently were on the Zero Page.

So, say you were making an dungeon crawl. You might store the player and monster positions on the zero page since you need to look at those every frame. You’d store the player and monster stats, items and skills in regular memory since you’d only need to check those in response to getting hit, using your current item or checking your inventory. And finally, you’d store your world map on disk, and you’d only read from the disk when you’d entered a new dungeon.

Back to project management. My head is the Zero Page, my notes are regular memory, my design documents are the disk. My head can’t actually store that much. If I’m trying to keep track of too many things, my head overflows and I get confused.

So let’s say I’m working on a font. I glance at a sample and notice that the P, G, N, W, T and Z need a bit of cleanup.

Normally what I’d do is just try to remember all that, start on the P, move on to the G… and then forget where I am.

But what I’m doing now is, I’ll glance at my font, and write in my notes that I need to work on these 6 letters. I start on the P, and completely forget about the other letters. When I’m done, I erase the P from my notes and note that the next thing that needs work is the G.

I’ve gone from editing my notes two or three times an hour to editing them every couple of minutes. Any given bullet point might only be there in my file for half an hour, or even as little as a single minute. But it’s totally worth it to sort of cache my thoughts there; and it’s not like I’m wasting paper since this is just a file on my computer.

* * *

The only problem with this is, my file is getting kind of long and unwieldy. And the longer and more detailed it gets, the more janky it feels to copy whole sections from the top and paste them on the bottom when cycling through projects. That, in and of itself, is adding a little bit of friction to this process.

I think it may be time for a proper app for this, which I’ve threatened to work on before.