One of the biggest challenges I face in my work is its lack of structure. I work from my home office on most days, connected to my work and co-workers via e-mail, IRC, bug tracking systems and other web applications. I have the infinite distractions of the Internet facing me from my three computer screens. Given the pragmatics of a two-career household and parenting, my work day is split into two or three pieces spanning all waking hours.

I wish that I could write about how I’ve beat this problem, and tell amazing stories about how productive I am. Instead, I’ll tell you about what hasn’t worked, and what seems promising.

To Do Lists

Making lists of things to accomplish, first thing in the morning seemed like a promising idea. I tried setting some goals for the day, striking a balance between the important and the immediate. But in practice, I find these lists too depressing to look at. Most items are there because I’ve been putting them off, and reminding me of them at the start of the day seemed to motivate finding distractions so that I didn’t have to think about them. The only success here was that it did help me get really important things done, such as daily exercise goals (top priority in any day), and some burning issues where I’d missed deadlines, or had them bearing down one me. But for the most part, To Do lists were slightly better than nothing.

Daily Schedule

After a day consisting mostly of meetings, I realised that I had been very productive. It’s sad, in a way, that a day of meetings seemed more productive than my average day. Perhaps that illustrates just how bad my problem is. But, it got me thinking: maybe I should attack the lack of structure directly by imposing a somewhat artificial structure on the day. So, I tried firing up my Google calendar, and scheduling events for myself to plan my day. I set aside a specific hour to two hours of the day for a specific task or project. I would schedule most of my day, and leave some time for breaks.

This has worked pretty well, for the most part. Even though it amounts to scheduling meetings with myself all day, I get more done with this structure than approaching each day ad-hoc, subject to any distraction that might occur. I’d like to set up a bit more of a pattern for what happens each day. For example, doing tasks in the morning that require more creative effort, and saving the “turn the crank” tasks for the afternoon. It would probably make sense to expose the daily plan to my co-workers to give them an idea of my plans as well.

I’ve got a long way to go. It’s 11:10 PM, and even without my calender I can tell it’s time for bed