Productivity Tip: Choose Between Batching & Thin-Slicing
It is 12:41 am, I was about to turn in for the night, and I realised that I have not written my 20 minutes for the day. I am sipping a mug of Milo right now. There's nothing like a mug of Milo right before bed. I suspect that Milo might be the cure for insomnia. Less teh tarik, more Milo, people.
It is 12:43 am. I cannot guarantee that you will be reading this post, because I am only committed to write for 20 minutes a day, not to post every day. I'll probably be posting more than one post a day anyway. For example, I've posted 2 posts today. I'm particularly pleased (and disturbed) with "Meet Mrs Darth Vader" (http://alphalim.me/meet-mrs-darth-vader).
And then, of course, there's my Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/alphalim) - you can follow me there or, if you're a Facebook friend of mine, you're already getting my tweets in your Facebook feed.
Talking about Twitter brings me to thinking about batching versus thin-slicing. One of Tim Ferriss's lifehacks is "batching". That is, allowing small tasks to accumulate and then tackling them all at one go. For example, it may be better to process dozens of emails in an hour than to process a couple of emails every half an hour throughout your work day, which would interrupt your work. That's one way of doing things.
Another way is to thin-slice. I used to have a monthly recurring task in my to-do list (I use http://toodledo.com/): "Run AppFresh". AppFresh is a nifty Mac app that searches your computer for all apps and notifies you of any updates available.
I ran it recently and more than a dozen - maybe twenty - updates were available. It took me a looong time to download all those updates. And even longer to install them. So, I thought, instead of batching this, how about thin-slicing this? (If you want to seem wise, just do the opposite of what you've been doing.) Instead of batching my updates and making a mountain out of molehills every month, I decided to run AppFresh every day. Automatically, of course. (I just discovered that feature.)
Now, on most days AppFresh doesn't bother me at all, and on those days that it does bother me, there are only one or two updates, which don't take long at all, at all. And my Mac stays fresh, fresh, every day!
Some things are better batched, some things are better sliced thin. If one way isn't working, try the other!
