Dopp Juice Archive

When I got off the train for work yesterday, I was already on the verge of tears with anger. I had spent the ride rolling work frustrations around in my head, and it had only made things worse. I couldn’t pinpoint the problems, and my entire job just felt impossible.

But I’ve learned a few things as a trial-by-fire project manager, and one is that my attitude affects my team’s ability to work. So I made the call: it’s better to show up late than to show up angry. I went to Target instead of the office, and called them to say I had errands to run.

At Target, I picked out a new notebook and a good pen. My plan was to go from there to a cafe and write until my situation looked less like an amorphous blob of insurmountable problems and more like a plan to get through it. On my way to the checkout line, though, I passed something bright that caught my eye.

They were only four-for-a-dollar.

I just couldn’t resist…

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I’m an independent contractor at my current job, which means I get to set my own hours. No one holds me to a schedule, and no one is concerned if I stroll in at noon some days (or don’t stroll in at all). More often than not, though, I show up to work at the exact same time every morning. I do this regardless of how I’m feeling — whether I want to or not. This means I’m more likely to be productive, and less likely to fall into that “later and later every day” temptation funk. The rest of my team may be less consistent, but they’ve learned to trust my schedule, and have naturally started to align theirs around it.

So what’s my magical secret? I meet my neighbor for coffee at the same time every day, and she has to be at work by 9am. It’s a standing date; if I want to cancel, I have to do extra work to let her know I won’t be there, lest she wait around for me and be late to work. I know that if I’m only answering to myself, I can control the expectations and make adjustments for my own comfort levels. But if I arrange my life so that I’m answering to someone else, at least on a simple but consistent level, I’m held accountable enough to be reliable. And then everything else can fall into place around that.

Lifehacker had an article recently about Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret: To accomplish something consistently every day (for him it’s writing), put up a big calendar on your wall and draw a red X over each day that you accomplish the task. Soon a chain will development, and you will enjoy adding to it. Your motivation becomes simple: don’t break the chain.

It’s the same concept as the morning coffee (although, i think mine is better). We need a backup motivation for those days when “this matters” just isn’t enough of a reason to get us out of bed. It’s the same reason as why ambitious New Year’s Resolutions tend to fail. We are too sensitive to our own needs to be our own strict disciplinarians.

I’m sure there are more tricks for self-imposed consistent action out there. I’d love to hear what’s working for you.

Written on My Baby* right now are two lists. One is titled Frogs and the other is titled Fruits. Believe it or not, this is how I figure out how to spend my day.

As far as I’m concerned, there are two different plans of attack for any to-do list. The first is called Low-Hanging Fruit — I identify everything on my list that can be taken care of quickly and easily, ambush it, and get it out of the way to make space for the more important stuff. This is most useful when it feels like I’m looking at a lot of clutter. I’m also very impressed when I see that my to-do list has gone from 52 to 10 in less than an hour.

There’s a second approach, and it’s called Eating the Frog. If the first thing you do every morning is eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that that’s probably the worst thing that’s going to happen to you today. Translated into time management, that means I pick my hardest, most challenging, most important, most likely-to-be-procrastinated task, and I do it before I do anything else. When I do this, I find that my days are all downhill from there, and I become chronically impressive. There’s a book written on this one if you want to know more.

In my world, everything is either a frog or a fruit– a difficult task or an easy task. Frogs need attention and determination and are best handled alone. Fruits need sharpness and momentum and are best grouped with other fruits.

Some days, though, I get really ambitious and try to go competitive frog-hunting. Frogs are funny creatures. They’re slippery, but if I can get a few of them grouped together, sometimes I can eat two or three at once. And then, sometimes, I’ll go eat another two or three, just to make them go away. I won’t lie; they taste awful. And it certainly helps if I can sweeten the meal with rewards for myself at the end. (And while fruit is nice, it’s often not enough to get the taste out of my mouth… blech!)

Some days, too, I do enough fruit-picking to make jam for the entire tech industry. If the fruits aren’t making me think too hard, this is best executed with loud dance music in the background. The result, if I’m not being careful, is a condensed remaining to-do list that feels totally impossible. Why? Because I’m left with a handful of frogs. And frogs tend to spoil the fruits.

They have to stay separate — the fruits and the frogs. They’re both important and they both require attention, but they can’t be handled at the same time. And really, I should wash my hands between touching them. And go outside to change the air. And call a colleague to announce my victories. And then go get coffee with that colleague.

Because there’s more to life than frogs and fruits, no matter how you slice them.

* My Baby is the 3’x4′ whiteboard in my living room.