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Hi folks! This week we will talk about Kevin’s change to a new team at work, our progress on our various things, and at least one upcoming appearance. We also talk about what is possibly the strangest troll Ursula has ever received, getting ready for the Hugo Awards Ceremony, and follow this with a great conversation with Special Guest Nancy Mittens!
Links for this Episode:
- Charity Spotlight: Feed more Western NY
- Nancy Mittens on Twitter
- Advent of Code 2021
- 2021 Hugo Awards
- DisCon 3/Worldcon 2021
- Alice’s Restaurant
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- David Allen’s Getting Things Done
- Remember the Milk
- FIFO/LIFO
- Ivy Lee Method
- Forest App
- Emergent Task Planner
- Drop Spindle
- Neil Diamond’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull
- Laziness Does Not Exist – Devon Price
Re ADHD tips — it sounds like Nancy already uses a lot of the ones I use or have tried. My current cocktail is freejournaling at the beginning of the day to figure out the general shape of what needs to be done. From that I can usually extract the one (1) task I will be attempting today, as well as the next two tasks I will be trying to knock out. The big ADHD adaptation there is working on project A on Monday, project B on Tuesday, project C on Wednesday, etc. instead of trying to do little bits of each every day. I also have a place to write down story/research ideas that pop up to distract me while I’m working on another project — I’ve seen people recommend a notebook for this, but I lose all my notebooks, so I open a new text document, write down the idea, and save it with a date in a folder with my other ideas. By contrast, if I get a sudden urge to clean something up, I usually chase that urge immediately, both at work and at home.
I will also say that going on Adderall let me use the systems I had already developed more fully and for longer periods of time. After the initial novelty of a productivity system wore off, I had trouble remembering that the system existed; now I have a much easier time using my tools consistently.
I got really into Forest this year and especially like how it lets me compare this month’s tracked productivity to the last, and also use tags to see how much time I’m dedicating to respective projects. (I am still too distractible to use timeboxing or any version of that, but I can choose a tag for what project I’m working on at the beginning of a 10- or 20-minute session of Forest and usually stay on task.) The same people make another app called “Sleep Town,” which rewards you with a little house when you don’t touch your phone between your prescheduled hours of the night (11 pm and 6 am, for example.) One of the worst parts of ADHD for me is how messed up my sleep can get and how badly that impacts every other part of my life, so that app can be helpful.
I still use Cold Turkey, mostly to block Twitter.
Ooo, Sharon, thank you! I will try some of that and see if it helps!
2 more links mentioned briefly in the podcast:
Cycle system link:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/time-management-for/0596007833/
Star method link:
https://tedsarvata.com/2013/10/18/priority-star-method-for-prioritization-2/
Nancy has the most soothing voice (and lots of great info)!
In terms of email and shopping spam etc… anything that I think or know will give me ads or might send junk or spam or sell/share my email address etc – that all goes under a separate email address. In this case – I have the same username for both and hotmail is where potential spam producers and shopping stuff goes, and Gmail is what I use for actual emails. Each day it takes under a minute to delete whatever came into hotmail that day, I can do it once in the morning. When I’m actually in the market for something I watch for emails from relevant stores/sites to catch sales and offers, and otherwise I can just delete all the new/unread mail that day for that email address.