chrisduran.eu

‘All you need is love’

Bugger that, Beatles. That line (as well as bowl-cuts, safari suits and mustard-coloured linoleumed walls) might have cut it back in the 60’s but fast-forward to the 21st century and I think that you are a lot more likely to hear the muttered line of ‘All I need is (more) time’.

It would be fair to say that in this day and age people have a lot more freedom in their lives. They have jobs with flexible working hours, it is easier then ever to move up/down/around/across and through job positions and career options. This perceived freedom can definitely be empowering but as the late uncle of a certain webbed-friend of mine is quoted as saying,

“With great power comes great responsibility”.

Being self-motivated, self-promotional and ‘putting in the hours’ is now almost essential for even the most humble of career progressions. Gone are the days of the chai wallah -> delivery guy -> office chick -> mysterious middle manager -> executive managerette -> … -> profit career path (see what I did there with the crossing of languages, genders and gendered suffixes? – take THAT P.C. brigade); in are the days of intensive self-schooling, re-tooling, self-promotion, side-projects, entrepreneurism and (perplexingly) social media experts.

I am no exception to this general trend. I currently put a lot of my time, heart and effort into probably the biggest project of my life, my PhD. Doing a PhD is not a trivial undertaking and one of its biggest perks is the flexibility it affords my schedule. Now I am apparently a gemini and whatever stock you may hold in star signs I definitely fit the stereotype of getting easily bored and look for variety and challenge in my life. I am happiest when working on a number of different projects. To this end, as well as working on my PhD, I always have a number of side-projects running – the most major of these being Cognicology and the Wifi mapping project. There is barely enough time to share across these projects let alone leaving enough time aside for other activities such as networking, self-schooling, and maintaining relationships: it is kinda like trying to spread the remains of an almost-empty jar of vegemite (the 1.0 stuff, not that iSnack two-point-crap rubbish) on your mornings toast.

Have you ever been to Cold Rock? Visiting a cold rock store is my personal version of hell. Not only are they happy with providing an impossibly large variety of ice-cream flavours, but they insist on tempting you to add an even more impossiblier variety of ‘mix-ins’. This gives you, as the ice-creamee, literally thousands of possible ice-cream combinations! Presented with this variety and open-ended flexibility very nearly cripples me – I am over-my-head with choice, freedom and self-determination and drowning in it. I believe this is almost exactly similar to the problem people are faced with in their professional lives today: there is a strong focus on having freedom and flexibility to work on the projects we want and we are free to organise our schedule to suit our needs. Instead of giving us the time to do what we want to do and achieve, we end up working harder and inefficiently. Most of us are ill-prepared to deal with the time flexibility in modern life and, if presented with some free time, will spend 7/8th of it on facebook.

So how do I (and you, and we) survive is this procrastination-rich, time-deficit society? Well NASA are still ignoring my letters and well-drawn diagrams on how we could use the USS Enterprise to slow down the rotation of the earth to increase the average day length to something on the order of 36-48 hours. So I suppose we will have to settle with learning new techniques to improve our time management, reduce our levels of procrastination and effectively prioritise our tasks. I spend a non-trivial amount of optimising my day-to-day life. Something that I have found is that the fight against procrastination is 20% technique, and 80% attitude. To this end, Alborz and I write extensively about how you can improve your attitude to make yourself happier, optimistic and more productive on our site, Cognicology.com

Filed under: general by Chris