Procrastination: I'll tell you about it later.

My 'terrible tuesdays' aren't as bad as I had feared. In architecture history we learned about cave paintings and stonehenge. Our reading homework is one chapter of the textbook a class, begining with chapter one. My finding purpose class was really interesting. The professor who teaches it studied art and design, but eventually became and still is, a practicing therapist. Today we talked about effective time management skills and it really started to ring a bell for me. He talked about time as a space, an area of hour blocks, with 168 blocks in a week. Many "technical errors" we make when planning I found myself I make.

Errors:
Tasks don't have a home -you don't set aside a specific time or occation to get the task done
Tasks are overly complex -needs to be broken down into simpler steps
Clean up my workspace -ordered, structured work areas translate to better efficiancy

He also talked about obsticles to good time management, various ways to prioritize your tasks, and about procrastination as a major impediment to good time management. He described procrastination as having two causes: 20% of the time you dont want to do it, but 80% of the time its caused from a fear of failure, a major fear of perfectionists. In a hall of design and architecture students, this really struck a strong chord. Ways to combat it were to just to start doing something, anything to get over that initial intertia, and giving it a home in your time/space.

What I found particularly interesting was his point on creativity and structured time. He said that structing your time actually increases your creative potential, as long as you set aside time for dreaming, zoning out, brainstorming etc. I'm not sure, but I'm willing to give it a try.

There was an interesting bit about prioritzing tasks, and how people who categorized the tasks 1-3 in importance always got the 3 tasks done, but seemed to finish the 1 tasks, even though they had very high personal priority. To combat this, he recommended something he does every day, which is to write down the three most important, vital things to get done that day in the morning, and to check back and see how you're doing 4-6 times a day. I think this is a great idea. I'm going to get my whiteboard and make a three line chart.

One last thing he talked about was the system of evaluating how he did for the day using the plus/delta system. It really reminded me of dad, when he talked about plus/deltas for road trips and other things. I miss them, they'd really enjoy this 118 degree weather back in chilly (for an arizonan) weather back in Moscow.

Anyway, today on my work, I flipped through a book on prision design and fallout shelters in the 1950s-onward.