750words.com + GTD = Focus

July 2010

One of the best ways of managing your time and your tasks is David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system. I’ve been a GTD adherent for the last four years. I’ve deviated a little from some of the practices in that time but never the principles (regular review, only care about stuff you can work on now, get it all out of your head).

However, one of the hardest things I’ve found to master is the concept of different levels of thinking to help you prioritise what to do next.

In GTD, to decide which tasks are more important than others, first you look at the context you are in and only consider tasks within that context. For example, it’s hard to blog when you’re in the supermarket, but it’s a handy time to remember you need to buy toothpaste. Then, you look at the time you have available (this isn’t worth starting as I don’t have time to finish it) and energy available (might not be a good idea to draft a difficult and taxing work proposal just before bed).

If you still can’t decide, then it gets interesting. GTD invites you to take a step back: moving from “ground” to “10,000ft”. Which project that these tasks are for will have the short-term effect I’m most interested in? Then step up another level, and another: which project advances my goals for the year? Which is the more important area I should be progressing now at this stage of my life? What meshes with my whole-life purpose?

These are deep questions, and I used to struggle to apply them to everyday task prioritisation. It seemed hard to remember where in my life purpose some of my more mundane tasks fitted, partly because I was thinking about deeper things much less frequently. So I left the “take a step back” method alone, going with what just felt right instead (which isn’t a bad way to prioritise to be honest).

However, through the power of 750words.com, I’ve finally managed to nail this part of GTD.

Morning Pages

There are many ways to clear your head and get yourself to focus. One is to write down everything you’re thinking about in an attempt to organise your thoughts. Some people call this Morning Pages: write three pages a day first thing in the morning, about anything and everything.

Morning pages is a great idea, but sometimes it’s difficult to motivate yourself to get on with private writing. Three pages seems a tall order to write every morning. That was, until I discovered 750words.com. This handy little site ensures that you not only do it, but that you do it every day. Using a full-featured incentive system of points, badges and challenges, you really don’t want to disappoint yourself by missing a day. The site gets you writing, and throws in some nifty writing statistics at the end of the process for some fun analysis of your state of mind. Heck, it even measures your typing speed, which comes in handy for Learn to Type Week!

I thought I’d give it a go a few weeks ago, as I had a fair amount on my mind at the time. What I didn’t realise was the effect it would have on my productivity. My mind was immediately clearer, and I was decisive and more focused. Blogging became easier again: once you’ve written 750 words of effectively brain-dump ‘whatever-you-want’ writing in the morning you are ready to keep on going with something more structured.

Because I use the time for fairly intense personal reflection, this practice unlocked the GTD prioritisation method. I’ve found that I’m moving up and down the GTD “ground”, “10,000ft”, “40,000ft” levels much more effectively. I often know just how a particular task fits into my life goal, as I’ve just written about that this morning. I’m naturally keeping the big picture in mind every day.

The word-crunching statistics that are produced over time are very telling. I’ve noticed an interesting effect now I’ve been doing it for the last three weeks: at first I found it hard to stop and all my writing was concerned with the present. Now it’s harder to think of what to write, but my thoughts are more valuable and much more reflective and deeper. I’m now using it to consider hard life decisions and priorities.

I’d very much recommend you try morning pages, especially if you struggle to focus, get carried away by random disparate thoughts or find it difficult to concentrate. I’m getting a lot out of it.

BlueSky

Introducing Morning Pages

September 2012

I’ve written before about the value of Morning Pages - a way of clearing your head in the mornings by writing down three pages on everything you’re thinking and feeling.

In order to write my words, I used 750words.com for a number of years, but I’ve become a little disenfranchised with having private writings stored permanently in the cloud. I also write fastest in vim, which means writing into a website slows me down. What I really wanted was to store my words privately on my laptop, and yet also include a public incentive system: this is what made 750words.com so effective at keeping me motivated.

gem install morning-pages

The result is the morning-pages gem. The gem has been available for a while, but starting today it’ll record your progress on a central website. It only ever uploads aggregate statistics: the code is open source so you can check it out for yourself to make sure.

For instructions, see the accompanying website. There aren’t any aggregate stats yet, but in future you’ll be able to see any word streaks, what times of day you are most likely to write, etc. I’ve got some nice ideas for visualisation which I’ll add as time permits: if you’re impatient you can always fork the website code and create whatever stats you want!

What do I use my words for?

Writing three pages is still something I try and do each day: I had a 170 day streak going at one point. I use my words to plan and order my day, to negotiate with myself about what I can realistically achieve, and for prayer and meditation - I’ve found I pray best at the point of a metaphorical pen.

Do you try to write each day? What do you use your words for?

Blogging again after a long hiatus

November 2024

It has been a long time since I wrote on this blog. Roughly 10% of the world’s population wasn’t even alive yet when I last posted - that’s sobering!

How to lead your life

January 2017

Rail tracks

Some of us might say that we aren’t leaders. However, we are all leaders of at least one thing: our own lives. We determine the way that we should go, what we spend today doing. If we allow our life to happen to us, then the our lives will be determined by the whim of others and not ourselves.

It’s quite possible for us to lead our lives without actually leading our lives, so in 2017 I’ve decided to try to do better at living a life that counts.

As a first step, I spent the first part of the week trying to simplify my life down to the core essence of what I want to focus on. Here’s my list today:

Build relationship with Ellie and the kids.
Continue my current fitness training regime.
Try to live according to the teaching of Jesus in my community. This is separate from what people might think of as “being a Christian”, but that’s a topic for another time.
Work to create systems that make people’s lives better. I’m currently doing this for money for various organisations, and by creating fun video games.
Teach and train people how to lead others and be amazing - that’s why I’m writing this post.
Improve my writing skills and range.

If something I’m doing doesn’t fit into this list, then I’ve decided to work towards removing it from my life.

More than ever in this present age of mass distraction, our headspace is the key limiting factor to productivity and achievement. It’s a resource to be managed and conserved. I’m only a week in, but have benefited hugely from the reduced focus already, and my job satisfaction is much improved.

If you made a list such as the one above, what would be on it? What should we remove in order to conserve headspace, and to focus on what counts?

Introducing Sol Trader

January 2012

Happy new year, everybody! It’s been a little while in coming, but I’ve finally got to the point where I want to announce the project I’ve been working on privately for the last few months. I’m heading after a dream, and I want to share it with you.

But first some background.

I love designing games

I started my career in software development working on PC games back at the turn of the millennium. I worked for a fantastic little company called Elixir Studios, which sadly closed in 2005. I’ll never forget them: they gave me my first break into software development and I studied my craft under some fantastic mentors, notably Achim Stremplat and Jamie Doornbos. These guys taught me a love of good code, and a love of doing things right.

On leaving Elixir, I moved away from the games industry and into web programming, leaving C++ and Microsoft Visual Studio far behind me. I spent a few years shifting through a number of languages (Perl, PHP, Java, Python) before settling on Ruby as my interpreted language of choice. I’ve never lost that love for building and designing games, though, and I’ve kept my hand in over the years. I’ve always been more interested in designing games, rather than playing them: as a kid I was always the Dungeon Master, or the guy designing the adventure. As an 11 year old I used to write games in BASIC on BBC Micros and sell them to my friends for 10p each. I guess you could say it’s built in to my psyche.

Sol Trader

Another realisation: one of the things that I’ve learnt in the last year is that I’d love to spend more time working on my own products. I have done this in a half-hearted fashion over the years, but my motivation tends to die off when the initial rush of enthusiasm fades. To help myself see it through to the end, I’ve decided to try to realise a long held dream. Alongside working with clients this year, I’m going to spend some of my remaining time building and releasing my first commercial game.

I’m therefore very pleased to announce Sol Trader - an open-ended space trading and exploration game set in our solar system in the near future.

The game itself has been in development since the end of October last year: it started as a side project with my kids (we originally named it Spacestuff) but has blossomed and grown into something much more. There’s some info on the website I’ve been putting together, but more will be forthcoming shortly. I’m aware that I’ve not got any screenshots yet, but once the first artwork goes in I’ll put some up. It’s already playable: my kids are already having great fun travelling between Earth and Venus via jump gates and landing on the planets.

When I’m ready for beta testers, I’ll put an announcement out on the mailing list: sign up at soltrader.net.

Motivate me!

One of the things I need to work on is the ability to complete my own projects. Working on a game is a great motivator, but I need help to keep my motivation up! I’d be very grateful if you’d drop me a note asking me how I’m getting on if you don’t hear from me for a while. Write a comment on a blog post, retweet something, sign up to get emails, ping me on twitter: every little bit of feedback I get (even if critical) helps to motivate me to work on it.

More on the game in future posts, including some thoughts on architecture, language choice and whether or how to release the source code. Crafting this codebase has already proved a treasure trove of interesting thoughts on code quality and testing, which I plan to share on this blog over time. I’m also aware that I’m breaking a few “indy game developer” rules: I’ll share my opinions about that, too.

Will I finish? Will it be a success? I’ve no idea, but I plan to learn as much as possible from doing it. At the very least, I’m shooting after a dream, and I’ll be pleased to finish 2012 having attempted it, whatever the outcome.

Have you got a half-baked dream you’re going to turn into reality this year? If not, why not?

Work with me

August 2011

I’ve been taking a break from my work and blogging for the summer: but now I’m looking for work again from next week.

To this end I’ve put up a new page on this site which has all the details of what I can offer, and my availability. If you’d like to work with me this autumn, do get in touch.

I also plan to start blogging again soon, with my first topic being how we handled the massive site traffic we experienced on e-petitions a couple of weeks ago.