| Your Computer and Desk Time |
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| Thursday, 13 August 2009 | |
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If you’re reading this article,
you probably have a computer, or regularly use one. Perhaps like me, it’s on your desk, in your
study or office, or a place in your home where you have your filing, bills,
folders, stationary.
My office also seems to be a
dumping ground for all sorts of stuff: things that need fixing, kids’ artwork,
and anything that does not seem to have found a home in the house yet, but
that’s another story. Oh, my sewing basket
lives here too, but don’t tell anyone I can sew, or they’ll all start queuing
up with buttons and stuff.
The biggest problem a lot of us
seem to have, is that when we sit down at our desk, it’s very easy to be
distracted from the tasks we actually need to do, like taking care of work,
study, bills or household papers, by things like surfing the internet, chatting
online and social networking sites.
It’s not that we shouldn’t be
doing these things – what’s wrong with planning your TV viewing, catching up
with news, staying in touch with friends and family, looking up things on
Wikipedia etc, it’s fun and useful – it’s just that it’s so easy to avoid other
things and suck up extraordinary amounts of time.
Ever checked on your kids doing
their homework and told them off for playing games and chatting online when
they should be studying? What about your
own computer time? Do you have chores
and necessary tasks you’ve been putting off because you’ve been spending your
desk time passively letting the computer lead you astray?
Ok, so how to get it under
control. Simple really, but you knew
that just as I do, and maybe just need reminding. Prioritising and time boxing.
That means, you do things in order
of priority, and you limit how much time you spend on each activity.
I know that can be hard, but if
you’re honest with yourself, don’t make excuses, and remind yourself of what
you really want to achieve, you can recognize and face up to incidences of
procrastination. Paying bills isn’t much
fun, and checking your bank balance might be unpleasant, but playing online
scrabble isn’t going to make it go away, and will be much more fun if you have
your important stuff done.
From time to time, it can be
useful to make a list (yes, I love making lists) of the various activities you
want and need to engage in. They will
fall into categories, and you can prioritise the categories. Here’s an example:
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Work, business, employment. For me this is writing these articles,
attending to business emails, website maintenance, managing my AdWords
campaign, record keeping.
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Study, if you are a student.
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Household administration – paying bills, reading mail,
filing, school notices, record keeping, phone calls, correspondence.
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Household social – downloading and organizing your photos,
personal emails, keeping in touch with friends and family, organizing your kids
artwork, keeping your contacts list updated, updating your family calendar.
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Personal projects – updating your iTunes, writing your own
movie reviews, updating your blog.
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Personal fun stuff – whatever you feel like doing at the
time – reading news, blogs, Wikipedia, playing games, social networking,
chatting.
As well as a basic outline like
this of the various categories of desk and computer activities, you need a realistic
estimate of time you wish to spend there.
Perhaps like me, you’ve had times when you’ve had to really force
yourself to go and sit at your desk or log onto the computer, and also times
when you’ve sat there from dawn til bedtime, getting up only when you had
to.
Obviously we need a healthy
balance rather than either extreme, and that can be achieved by, you guessed
it:
Habits and routines!
So, your personal reasonable and
sensible amount of desk and computer time might be anywhere between half an
hour and eight or more hours per day, one to seven days per week, depending on
your needs and interests and whether you are studying or working at home. If you work outside the home you can also
apply this to how you balance your time at work.
If you don’t spend enough time at
your desk or computer, your bills and papers can pile up, things can get out of
control, and you will be unfamiliar with your computer and your desk stuff,
making it harder for you when you do sit down to tackle it. Some people new to computers still struggle
to keep up with computer updates and regular email checking.
If you spend excessive amounts of
time at your desk or computer, you are unlikely to be using the time
constructively, and are probably neglecting other areas of your life. If you’ve been ordering a lot of pizza and
sitting in your dressing gown for three days straight, perhaps you’ve been
sucked in by a chat forum, an online game, chatting, taking endless quizzes and
so on. I think it would be fun if I was
like the Sandra Bullock character who was a complete computer nerd and
understood all that technical stuff, doing far more interesting and challenging
things, writing my own programmes and stuff.
What fun that would be.
So, having decided upon a
reasonable amount of time to spend and how often you should spend it, you need
to break it down into, for example:
Monday to Friday
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2 hours of study
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30 minutes household admin
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1 hour of writing
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30 minutes on emails
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30 minutes to play
Weekends
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15 minutes checking email, facebook etc
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1 hour maximum reading or playing
Further to this, you need to
structure your time within those categories.
Within your work or study time, you will have some regular daily
maintenance tasks which must be done regularly, but not take up all the
allocated time. Emails in particular
must be limited if they tend to stretch out, and it’s worth considering doing
them last rather than first each day.
This applies to record keeping too.
It must be done, but efficiently and within a limited amount of
time. Remember, the basis of your work,
business or study is the actual product – the writing, the project, the
assignment, the sales, and this must be the first priority. To support the main activity, you have
another activity such as gathering information, reading, studying, compiling,
brainstorming, monitoring statistics etc.
So, balance must be sought within
each type of activity, as well as overall in your life.
This is why it’s worth thinking
about the various parts of your life, and how each of them consists of time
spent on various activities. You then
create a basic outline of routines and habits which evolve and refine.
So today, having completed this
article or the allocated time to be spent on it, I then move onto business
emails, monitoring statistics and record keeping for a limited time, then onto
a pre-determined amount of time for research and development (this is what I’m
calling all the miscellaneous stuff today), then onto my household bills and
forms and papers and mail, then I’ll play with my iPod for a bit, check the TV
guide, read some news etc.
As usual, this has been my little
chat to myself about what I need to be doing.
Hope it was useful to you too. |
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