TLDR: Trying to use my time “effectively” sometimes results in an even greater “ineffectiveness”. Specifically if it leads me to thinking that multitasking is an answer. Instead, now I try to use the “ineffective” time to better focus on the current task and it seems to work quite well.
Quite often I find myself running a long task on a computer: downloading something huge, compiling a program, or generally waiting for something to complete.
Every time I have a “spare minute” like this I often find myself switching to something else and I end up multitasking. In the end: the long-running thing have completed long ago, I work on a totally different low-priority task, or worse, checking my Slack; switching back to the original task is now horribly painful.
So, I tried to pay more attention to my thinking process when this happens, in an attempt to analyze how and why it happens. Now I think I got a clear snapshot of it. My immediate thinking is:
- “The wait time is the time wasted — I just stare at the screen waiting for some task to complete without any need in my personal involvement”
- “This is awfully ineffective!”, my mind tells me. “If I continue like this throughout the day — I will only spend half of my time actually doing stuff, and half the time staring at the screen.”
- “Why waste my time like this? I can do something else while this thing is running.”
- “Yes, yes, while some other things just work by themselves, I can work on something else in parallel. This is an effective use of time!”
In an attempt to be more effective I go through a series of steps that make me less effective. Each individual step, each conclusion sounds logical, but the whole picture is flawed. It ultimately leads me to multitasking, context switching, or worse: just wasting my time on a local news website. You know, because it was supposed to be just a quick glance.
So, the point of this post is how the intent to be more effective leads to a counter-productive result. I just find it very curious.
Lesson learned: I need to be more conscious when trying to optimize the use of my time.
Now, instead of switching to another task, I try use the “wait time” to plan and think through the next steps for the current task at hand.
Sometimes I would write down the next steps in my notebook, and maybe try to think through the different outcomes and decide what I would do in each case.
This seems to work quite well for now. Once the “wait” ends I usually know exactly what to do next and can jump right into it.
Funny story: in spite of whatever I wrote about how I try to not to multitask, I started to write this post while I was “waiting for a few files to download”. Needless to say they were actually downloaded about an hour ago. But I tricked myself into thinking that I had a “muse” and had to write it down quickly while it didn’t left me… Now I should hope that this doesn’t happen a lot, or I will need to find a way to deal with this too.
