When I was in law school and had a big project that seemed both impossibly demanding (like learn a semester's worth of a subject in two days) and also unbearably boring or difficult to focus on, I would trick myself into studying for it by asking myself what the bare minimum amount of sufficient study time might be. Either the lowest number required to get a basic grasp of the material or a number that it was reasonably likely I would be able to do, when push came to shove. That might be something like 12 hours, real hours, of studying for a class.
I would then draw 12 circles on a piece of paper on which I would start some kind of rudimentary outline -- a breakdown of the general topic areas covered on the syllabus, for example.
When I studied for an uninterrupted period of time, I got to color in the appropriate fraction of a circle with a colored pencil. Sometimes I got fancy and color coded the colored-pencils with the subject areas -- a yellow circle meant I had studied an hour on one part of the syllabus, a red circle was an hour for something different. I made up a rule: if I studied a solid 50 minutes without interruption, I got to color in a whole circle. Two 25 minute chunks, though, were only worth 50 minutes. This technique was refined and employed with great effect for the bar exam.
It's a technique I still use to keep myself on task without beating myself up for taking breaks. I am working on a brief right now, and I have six circles on my pad of paper. Two and three quarters of them are colored in. It's possible that as I progress I will add another circle -- I would do that on occasion in law school. But wierdly I discovered that my instincts were pretty good -- that "bare minimum" number often turned out to be just right. Some exams I even went into with several circles un-colored in, and did fine. What the circles did, though, was take away the guilt and despair of the looming "I should be studying right now" ness. All I had to do was fill in those circles. And with the 50-minute hour rule, I was incented to go for longer stretches without checking email, or getting distracted, or otherwise wasting time.
Hey! That sounds like an interesting way to stay focused on an uninteresting task. I may have to try that sometime.
Posted by: Terrance | April 26, 2004 at 01:23 PM
What a great idea!
Another great idea to help me stay focused would be software that blocks me from blogging and reading blogs from 8 am to 5 pm.
Posted by: UCL | April 26, 2004 at 06:26 PM
Oooh, neat idea. I use a timer and set if for 15 minutes at a time to get through unpleasant projects. I know I can do anything for 15 minutes and usually by the time the 1st 15 minutes are up, I can continue. We moved several years ago to a different state. Even though I'm wasn't working, I took the bar. I had two kids, we were in temporary housing with most of our stuff in storage getting ready to move into a new house and I managed to study for and pass a bar exam with my 15 minute rule. Thanks for an interesting twist on breaking up projects into manageable chunks.
Posted by: Debbie Eberts | April 27, 2004 at 10:29 PM