I waste way too much time doing completely useless stuff when I should be working on my dissertation, reading papers, writing papers, and learning things that will bring me closer to my degree. I’m ready to stop procrastinating.
How I Will Become More Productive
In an attempt to work more efficiently, I am going to take up Seth’s self-experimentation offer that I found via Andrew’s post. I am going to self-experiment; I am going to collect data about myself; and I am going to find out if my two-pronged method to stop procrastination works. Here’s my plan:
- I will make a to-do list every night to lay out what will get done the next day
- I will enable the Greasemonkey script – Invisibility Cloak – which will block all the sites that I waste too much time on except during lunch and on the weekend
How I Will Judge Improvement
To measure my progress, I will make use of two Firefox plugins – Browser Statistics and TimeTracker. The former keeps track of the amount I’ve downloaded (in megabytes) while the latter is a timer for time spent browsing the Web.
Luckily I’ve had these two plugins enabled for a little over a month, so at the end of this month, there will be something to compare to. From January 27 to March 2, I downloaded 23,524.73 megabytes and spent a whopping 364 hours browsing. That’s about 653 megabytes and a little over 10 hours per day. OK, that’s embarrassing.
Join Me In This Self-experiment
I’ll do this for one month with a midway report on March 17 and a final report on March 31. You can subscribe to the feed to stay updated, and if anyone wants to join me on this, all the better. Just leave a comment below so that we can keep track of results.
Procrastination-free days start now.
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Definitely a well-written post. *applause* I agree with you about the need to stop procrastination. I’ve found help at http://www.stop-procrastination.org and that website has a variety of ways to stop procrastination. I’ve tried and i can already see an improvement in my condition. should try.
So glad I saw this on Seth’s blog. Surfing is a big, big time waster for me. Once I get going I just can’t seem to stop, and it’s really keeping me from doing things I care a lot about.
I’ll be following along and hope this will motivate me to get my constant browsing under control as well.
Great tips on the plugins – I will definitely check them out.
@Beth: Seriously. I get started on a few sites, and all of a sudden a few hours have passed. I don’t know where all the time goes. It’s my second day implementing my plan and I’m already feeling more productive. It’s my “12-1 lunch break” now.
Nathan,
You certainly have the right audience here ;) — all of us blog readers are guilty as charged on the procrastination front. I will check out these tools, hopefully transparency on my time-utilization will shame me into being more productive.
Mike
p.s. Stay away from Scrabulous!
This is related. I wanted to do some better analysis of where my time was spent. I came up with screenshots and movies. I have a friend that did window handles and Google Charts. You can see some of the results here http://www.bruceandmo.com/b/efficiency
interesting. web worker daily just posted a few days ago about three programs that you can use to record your actions:
http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/03/03/3-ways-to-automatically-track-your-time/
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