15min: Developing good habits

[mdlbear]

The items I've started tagging with 15min are part of a scheme I came up with last Tuesday for developing good habits by breaking never-ending tasks like sorting receipts, reducing clutter, and managing my websites into little (nominally 15-minute) pieces. The hope is that I'll do two or three every day, and so far it seems to be working. Another hope is that these things will become habits along the lines of taking my drugs, doing the laundry and dishes, and tracking things in my to.do list. The third hope is that I'll spend more time actually doing things rather than glumly and guiltily staring at my to.do file looking for something to do or, worse, looking for things I've already done or have long since given up on. There are a surprising number of the latter.

15min tasks are loosely categorized into "buckets", with the idea that I'll pull tasks out of two or three different buckets every day. As tasks become firm habits, some of the buckets may disappear -- for example, there are no buckets for paying bills online or doing dishes, because I'm pretty consistent about doing those. (There's no bucket for taking walks, even though I'm not very consistent about it, because those have been tracked separately for a long time and somehow don't "feel like" 15min tasks.)

The current list of buckets looks like:

• Decluttering. This was, of course, the original meaning of the tag. (Thanks to thnidu for reminding me of this post.)
• Receipt sorting: sales tax, income tax, healthcare, etc.
• Paperwork: taxes, mostly, though it also includes canceling services, triaging the to.do list, and similar things.
• Check writing: unlike regular bills, which are paid online, this includes charities, subscriptions, and other things that only get paid infrequently. I hate writing checks.
• Web hacking: updating the website, fixing the makefiles, writing tools... It's not unpleasant, I just forget to do it.
• Music: recording, practicing, writing and updating lyrics files... I sometimes need to be prodded to do fun things, too.

If you're following the "raw notes" section of my done posts, you can expect to see lines like:

  * 15min: declutter the office, mainly the left-hand pile.

I won't usually mention them in the narration unless there's something unusual to say about them.

Before you ask, this is just something I came up with on my own; it's unrelated to Flylady, Getting Things Done, 42 Folders, or any other formal structure; it is, however, influenced by what my friends have been blogging about, and a moderate amount of web-reading.

Comments are, as usual, welcome.

Comments

[chaoswolf]

Web hacking? Oh, yeah. About that. I still haven't heard anything from Tempered Glass regarding the artwork, so I am not going to work on it until I'm asked to when I can be certain of getting feedback.

[mdlbear]

We can talk about it at Conflikt.

15 minutes

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I can't remember when I first came across the 15 minute sprint (or bucket if you will), but it has served me well many times.

Things like gardening, sorting papers, sorting clothes etc. are daunting large tasks that I try to put off as long as possible ... but if I tell myself "ok, I will spend exactly 15 minutes doing *some* of that" then I can usually manage to get a nice little dent into it.

And when I have something like friends visiting the next day and there's half a dozen big tasks to do, I get them done better if I do "15 minutes filling the dishwasher and rinsing dishes, 15 minutes tidying hallway, 15 minutes picking up stuff in living room, 15 minutes working on bathroom" with five minute breaks in between, and then go back around the list of tasks again until individual areas are complete. I know it would drive some other people crazy to leave a task incomplete, but I find I can "sprint" for 15 minutes but that I need a break (or a change to a different task) after that.

Your scheme also sounds like the classic "elephant task" method ... eating an entire elephant in one sitting is pretty much impossible ... but if you eat 8oz each day, eventually the entire elephant will be consumed (or go stinky and be thrown away, but that's being a little too literal!) ... my old Time Manager International binder had a place to note "elephant tasks" and to tick off each day when you'd eaten your plateful ...

... sounds like it really should work, and I wish you every luck! As someone with a totally cluttered life, I take inspiration from this posting!

[shadowe_wraithe]

I've been buried in my own mess, as if you read my last post you'll know/understand more clearly.

Have you checked out The Fly Lady?

http://flylady.com/

Much good help on getting organized and sorted out...hope something she has may help!

[mdlbear]

I just looked there a couple of days ago; it seems a bit structured for my taste, but probably warrants some exploration.

[shadowe_wraithe]

I agree it seems "too" structured, but there are some good ideas that even someone like myself, who is very AR but not as structured as she is, can use...I do try to do some of the things she breaks into small chunks. Her methods definitely have helped me in many areas.