AKA “Surviving the Open Office.” I typically don’t have earbuds in when I’m working, but when it is too quiet or too noisy or I am distracted by other thoughts, they help. In fact sometimes they help on their own – I put them in, get sidetracked before playing anything, and find I’m already working better!

However, the placebo effect does not always work, and I’ve been gathering options for what to play through those earbuds.

1. The One-Song Playlist

I’m a very lyrics-oriented person, which means music with lyrics is in general a poor choice to listen to if I’m trying to get work done. The exception is a short “focus” playlist, an idea I got (via some other forgotten blog post) from Joseph Mosby’s post The Psychology of a Small Playlist on Repeat. The idea is that as you listen to a song on repeat, it fades away from your conscious attention, while still occupying parts of your brain that might otherwise interfere with your focus. I’ve had success with a playlist of 3 favorites – by the third time through they are completely gone from my awareness.

What songs to use? Songs you already like listening to a large number of times. I would probably avoid pairing songs that are extremely different in character – a low, slow song followed by a loud, intense song might still jar you – but otherwise it’s an entirely personal choice.

2. Lyric-less Playlists

I have a few bookmarked Spotify playlists that are good for working. No lyrics, not too much dynamic range within any given song, a good steady beat – those are my criteria.

I started with Brain Food, a Spotify-curated list of “hypnotic electronic.” Some of the tracks I skip but overall it’s still a good choice. I fool around with a variety of trance playlists sometimes, such as ~ Trance Chillout ~, but every one has tracks I have to skip because they’re too jarring, or they have lyrics despite the “absolutely no lyrics” promise of the playlist description, or because there’s a sound that moves quickly from ear to ear and causes me actual pain.

Later I learned about Retrowave, music inspired by 80s movie soundtracks and video game music, and two same-name playlists became my go-tos: RetroWave / Outrun by Spotify, and the longer Retrowave / Outrun by fatmagic. They’re still my standards, with Brain Food coming in for the occasional change.

3. Non-Music Options

Sometimes even instrumental music is too distracting for me, and sometimes I just want a change. Spotify has white noise playlists, but I find the jumps from track to track very noticeable, so for those situations I have a collection of bookmarked noise-generation sites.

The first I discovered was Coffitivity, recordings of a coffee shop at different times of day. There are three long tracks available for free, and three more if you pay a small annual fee.

For nature noises I have been enjoying Noisli, which lets you layer tracks at individual volumes; it includes various nature-based tracks plus a cafe, train, and some more white-noise-ish options. I enjoy dry leaves blowing around paired with a quiet stream, or paired with a rainstorm for a physically impossible combination of sounds. Rain + train is another good combination as long as you keep the train volume down. I tried to pair cafe and fire, but I could never find the sweet spot for the fire volume between “way too prominent” and “so quiet it just sounds like static.”

The most recent additions to my rotation are the many generators from myNoise. I have barely scratched the surface of the long list, but the tonal drone and soundscape generators are what I’m drawn to: musical without having a melody, a slowly evolving soundscape. The feature that differentiates myNoise from other sound sites is that every track is split out by pitch, even its nature tracks, and each pitch’s volume is adjustable separately. That allows you to adjust the track based on your preferences, your hearing, or the background noise you are trying to drown out. I tend to like the “brown” preset, which makes the lowest pitch loudest and brings down the volume gradually as the pitch increases. The site has bandwidth limitations and other restrictions at the free tier, but even a $5 donation removes those permanently. It is hard to pick a generator to recommend specifically, but the one I found first was Osmosis, one of the soundscape generators; from there I went to Northern Lights, a tonal drone. Those will give you the idea!

Adorable doodle by ElisaRiva on Pixabay.

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I started my work life as a mathematician. My ongoing work was research, the content of which was up to me. Research fit in around teaching classes, which were scheduled for me; attending seminars and meetings (up to 3 a week typically); and holding office hours, scheduled as I chose. Through most of my time as a web developer, I’ve had one significant weekly meeting and the possibility of a handful of smaller ones, but the rest of my time is mine. Furthermore, one of my duties is to learn new things to meet the needs of the designs or simply to implement them in a better way than I previously knew how. What those new things are is up to me.

This means for my entire career I’ve been in charge of the majority of my work schedule and content. The key measure of my work has been “how much did you get done?” Hours per week have been borderline irrelevant, and working outside the bounds of the 9-5 weekday schedule has been the norm. Figuring out how to shape and structure my work life has been a process.

There are two key challenges:
1. How do you get yourself to work hard when your schedule is so open?
I find that having too much time to accomplish something breeds procrastination. Conversely:
2. How do you define “enough work” when you could (should?) always be doing more?
This is a problem mathematicians are prone to, I found, because there is no definition of “enough research.” It can lead to guilt over any time that could be spent working and isn’t, but less productivity during work hours due to burnout. Since there are far too many technologies to master – or truly, even to become conversant with – in any reasonable length of time, the problem has followed me to web development.

Here are five key components to effective scheduling that I’ve identified.

1. Priorities

If the collection of work you would ideally be doing is more than the amount of time available to do that work, you have to decide what’s more important or pressing and what can be let go of for the time being. This would seem to go without saying, but the amount of work required to figure out priorities surprised me when I left mathematics. I started out with a feint at professional craft design; it and web development both require a wide variety of skills that optimally you would have but clearly can’t learn all together, all at once. There are also unlimited options for projects to work on. Where to start? What’s okay to save for later?

My point here is really just to expect that prioritizing your work will take time and thought. In addition to thinking about, say, what new skill is going to have widest applicability or which project will improve your portfolio the most, pay attention to the things you know you should do but really don’t like. For me as a crafter that was what I called “the hustle”: actively trying to sell my patterns and solicit new work opportunities. I had to prioritize that very highly or I would never have done any of it.

2. Slack

Slack is the idea of unscheduled time, leaving gaps in your timeline to accommodate unforeseen problems, tasks taking longer than they “ought,” and new ideas, such as recording a blog post outline or sketching a plan to refactor some piece of code. Slack keeps those unforeseen problems from wreaking havoc with your entire day and allows you to capture the new ideas before they flit away again. You may not have much ability to build in slack when a deadline is bearing down on you, but most of the time you can simply make sure the amount on your to do list is a little less than what you expect to be able to get done in a day.

As a sidebar, slack is relevant to your physical environment too. You need space to work in, of course, but what can be lost is open space to, say, set a box on while you get something out of it, or stash a few things gathered over the weekend for a Tuesday meeting.

I got the term “slack” from the book Scarcity, in which you can read an excerpt discussing the need for both physical and schedule slack.

3. Critical Mass

I get more done when I have sufficient conflicts to make my time more precious – but only up to a point. Too many conflicts become counter-productive again. I experienced this in my teaching schedule; each quarter I would teach 0, 1, or 2 courses. Relative to the amount of time available, the one-course terms were my most productive research terms.

The number of outside demands on your time is not necessarily something you can control, but this notion does imply that canceling obligations may not be the answer to getting more done. You may be able to make your own conflicts by deciding to do X at a given time and get Y done beforehand; this doesn’t work well for me but may for someone else.

4. Deadlines

Deadlines are a self-manager’s best friend. If it doesn’t matter when something gets done, no matter how good it would be in principle to do, it likely won’t happen. Self-imposed deadlines are nearly as good as external deadlines; setting them on those “I should learn this / improve this” projects can help that work not get lost among the work other people are waiting on.

I am most productive on big projects if I work backwards from the final deadline to set intermediate deadlines – with slack built in! I edited my textbook over the course of three months or so by counting the number of sections in the book and dividing them up among the weeks to my deadline, with occasional light weeks for catch-up time. I do the same with web development projects, listing the features I want to add and splitting them out over the time until my deadline.

5. Stopping

Taking time off is critical for avoiding burnout, and ultimately getting more done than if you tried to work 80 hours per week. This can be another way to get the critical mass of conflicts to push you into higher productivity: “I’m not working tonight, so I have to get this done now.” (This version of making your own conflicts does work for me.)

Time off is also an important step in learning and problem solving. Between consecutive mathematics classes the students have “soak time” to internalize the vocabulary and concepts – I don’t remember where I got the term, but I quite like it; it is one of the reasons compressed summer courses can be more challenging than regular semester courses. In problem solving you need to pound data into your brain, of course, but then walk away and let your brain sort and reconnect the information unconsciously for a while. This can happen while you’re working on something else, but is more likely to happen while you’re on a walk or in the shower.

Putting Them Together

So, then, how do you work hard and define “enough”?

Define your goals: determine your highest-priority tasks and break them down into pieces that you can accomplish in a smallish amount of time (up to a few days is ideal for me).

Assign deadlines: if you have external deadlines (typically for larger chunks of work) work backward to split them out into intermediate deadlines. Account for conflicts and other work needs, and build in slack. Make your own deadlines for other work, but don’t overload any given time period.

From deadlines, create to do lists.

Embrace schedule conflicts as motivators.

Stop when you’ve finished your list for the day. If you’ve made your list from your priorities and deadlines (whether self-imposed or external), checking it off is enough. Breathe deep.

Photo of Maria Spelterini crossing Niagara Falls from Wikimedia Commons.

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I’m pretty obsessed with organization and productivity systems, and regularly try to upgrade mine. Of course as my life situation changes my organizational needs do too. Currently I’m working with:

• Binder for 5.5″x8.5″ paper with monthly calendar, week-in-view pages, and a section for ongoing and long-term to do lists
• Staple-bound two-year calendar (monthly, small) for carting around if need be
• Asana for business projects and some individual items: programming and blog post ideas and relevant links, gory details of large programming projects
• Assorted notebooks and looseleaf for meeting notes and to do items to be processed

It is rather a lot, but there is a lot to keep track of. The hub is the binder, which holds all the scheduling and long-term to do lists (not necessarily with all their details, of course). Asana is the equivalent of the binder for my team; we stash everything there. Everything else is supplemental.

Here are some comments on why I use the items I do.

Asana is a system we learned about through my business partner’s husband, who uses it at work. It’s a great way to coordinate a team. We use it for to do lists, idea lists, running conversation, and sharing files. Like any system, it has its drawbacks (in particular, I wish I’d known before I got embedded into the built in “Personal Tasks” workspace that I wouldn’t have the ability to rearrange the project list there), but it makes it pretty easy to stay coordinated and get necessary information back and forth.

The to do list section is a recent addition to the binder. I realized the binder wasn’t really the centerpiece if it only had scheduled items and daily to do lists, which of course can’t be made terribly far in advance. When I was first getting myself organized post-professorial-life, I tried Getting Things Done, the system in David Allen’s book of the same name. I still haven’t read the book; that first link is a summary, and you can read GTD information on zenhabits and 43 Folders sufficient to get going.

The takeaways at this point are Inbox Zero (which is never literal for me, but I try to keep my email inbox to one screen and keep my paperwork under control) and emptying my brain. I’ve started a weekly brain dump, writing down everything I want or need to do, regardless of deadline or importance. That information is then parceled out onto lists by category. Note that this doesn’t necessarily help you prioritize or select things to focus on, or give you any benchmark for “enough” work in a day; when I was attempting to be a professional crafter, I used a version of David Seah’s Printable CEO to score points for various activities. I’m not doing that right now, but if I were to try to be a freelancer I would probably turn back to it.

The binder itself stemmed from the realization that one reason my hardbound planner wasn’t working was that when I am really busy I turn to looseleaf to organize myself. I thought with a binder I could have my cake and eat it too, with pages that could be left out but then be put back. I still use looseleaf sometimes, but far less often.

Most of the binder is Scattered Squirrel printable planner pages, in case you’re looking for such things. I also crafted some items for it, which you can see in the craft blog post that shares a name with this one.

The staple-bound calendar was intended for my purse, but I’ve downsized the purse situation past where it fits. However, if I’m going somewhere where I’ll want to know my schedule, I can take it along. Once a week I synchronize my calendars.

I love notebooks. Paper is my friend. To make sure my notebooks love me back I try to use the Bullet Journal system. Mine’s a weak approximation, but I mark to dos with a checkbox, points of information with a bullet, and things I need to look into with an eye, and number all the pages and leave space at the beginning for a table of contents, which I try to update regularly. The Bullet Journal system doesn’t work at all for my day to day random jottings, but it’s terrific for meetings. I also find the right-arrow notation for to do items that have been rewritten in a different list extremely helpful.

This notebook, others, and random bits of paper I’ve written on are taken care of during the weekly GTD brain dump.

Finally, a note on something I don’t use, but have tried out in the past: a blog editorial calendar. I would write plans in and then change 90% of them, even multiple times. It works far better for me to keep lists of ideas, then text files for the baby steps (despite my love of paper, I most often blog entirely electronically), and then draft posts once they’re reasonably close to ready. The only scheduling I do now (aside from scheduling finished posts for future publication) is via putting specific posts on my to do lists.

When I was preparing to change careers from being a math professor, I considered professional organizing, and looked at their professional development to see what I could learn. There I had a general principle articulated to me that I’ve tried to abide by ever since: suit the system to the habit, don’t try to change the habit to suit the system. For instance, if you do something at the dining table that “should” be done at a desk, you’ll be more successful in staying organized if you give the necessary materials tidy homes in the dining room than if you try to force yourself to start working at a desk. All planner systems should abide by this principle – they should work with you, not force you to change yourself to work with them. I’m sure mine isn’t fully tweaked yet, but using a planner with removable pages and not using a blog editorial calendar despite all advice to do so are both ways I’ve tried to make working with my system a downstream swim rather than against the current.

Notebook photo by jarmoluk on Pixabay.

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