His technique is pretty much the standard for task management.
Every week, I submit the following weekly report to my boss.
Last Week:
- Meetings:
- Planned:
- Unplanned:
- Blocking Issues:
This Week:
- Meetings:
- Planned:
Each week, I create a list of commitments/tasks that I plan to perform. In "Last Week", I simply report [DONE] or [NOT DONE] and explain why a given task wasn't done. I strive to complete all my commitments and view NOT DONE as unacceptable.
I have a task to check my weekly commitments every morning. Each day, I paste in a 9-5 template where I plug in tasks around meetings from my weekly commitments.
I save all my side projects for later in the day as a reward for completing my other tasks.
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SilkWizard wrote:
This is a very cool article in that it goes beyond the easy answers I hear time and time again of "schedule" or "just do it." Thanks for that.
Re: Design
It's true I've been bad at getting things done, but I've certainly developed a ton of experience with the process of development to the point where I can support the idea that having the design down on paper ahead of time can make a big difference.
For me at least, programming is easy, design is hard. At first, design requires a great deal of abstract visualization to come to an understanding of what the finished product should work like. Then, design requires a great deal of patience as I painstakingly work out exactly how these details will work. I suspect there's only one cure for this: hard practice and experience.
I started my GSDC'10 with the idea that, if I were to base it predominantly on the Lode Wars model, the design concerns would be minimal. However, two problems emerged:
First, that my creative drives demanded I deviate from the original design - no longer were these alien adventurers digging through dirt, but rather configurable mecha. This brought a whole new slew of design hurdles, and the one I found myself stuck on with this: how do the weapons attach and are activated by the player? I had many possible solutions, but none of them seemed particularly comfortable.
Second, that just because I know exactly how a game of Lode Wars functions from beginning to end doesn't mean I understand how the underlying design holds the thing together. Consequently, I still had a great deal of design work to do even with a working model to base it upon.
Well, anywho, I do need to work on becoming self-motivated. Not just for my endeavors here on BYOND, but for my endeavors just about anywhere in life.