I've been thinking about my productivity lately, especially as it's been 4 months since I started my intermission and I can't think of one major project I have completed. Sure there have been a heap of little ones, plus I'm now working, but even so, given how much time I have I should have more to show for it.
My problem I reckon, if you can call it that, seems to be that I like to have my hands and legs in everything: oooh, a cool new technology! oh, this drives me nuts, let's make it better. hey mate, you reckon you can do me a favour?
It's one of the downfalls of being interested in such a fast-paced and far-reaching industry - it surrounds you, but yet you have to keep up, or be left behind. So I read blogs, news sites, explore different techniques, taking you to places you never intended at all (wasting a couple of hours in the process), but hey, it's the latest and greatest, and cool.
The fact that I'm one of those people who sees room for improvement in almost everything doesn't help either - why is it so difficult to find the next city loop train at a city loop station, why are the information displays in trains and on platforms so underused and useless, and why is there not an efficient way to have the timetables on my phone (I'm on a train writing this, hence the train theme).
Obviously there are things that I can't fix on my own (e.g. the former two - unless I do something massive like, hmm, start an advertising billboard company, and pitch an idea to replace the Connex timetable monitors and in-train displays with a better timetable viewing solution, intersparsed with ads to fund it? - communication is a big problem of there's, on top of the late trains). But others I can, like the latter, and so my mind goes crazy thinking about the possibilities and inevitably, I have to plan/write something or I won't be able to concentrate on anything else.
On top of that, I've been having people contact me via this blog asking for help or offering jobs/roles, and being the nice person that I am, I end up saying yes to some of them, adding another load on to my plate. I'm actually fairly surprised that people have so much faith that I can do jobs I myself have no belief or idea how, even when they know I have no experience in doing it. Makes me wonder why I'm going back to uni sometimes, but I'm not opening that can of worms again - been done and decided already.
I feel like I'm being stretched in all directions, and as a result, not getting very far in any of those directions. I'm having fun, but I need to feel like I'm getting somewhere, and right now I don't.
It seems to me that productivity and projects are directly related up to a certain point - after all, only having one project to work on would be very boring, and there'd be no other productive way to escape. After a certain point however, productivity begins to fall because there are too many things for your mind to concentrate on, process, and keep up with. We're not machines after all - we can't just switch off everything else and concentrate on only one project. If the project is worth it, you'd be thinking about it 24/7.
All this kind of sounds like the law of diminishing returns in economics, which inspired the diagram below.
So the goal is to be at the sweet spot (the red cross). To find it and get there, I'm gonna try and distill what I want to do into a single sentence over the next few days, then filter my projects (current and future) through it, and chuck out the ones that don't get through.
I'm mindful of the fact that I should pursue other avenues too - after all, being well-rounded is a good thing - so this isn't a be all and end all filter, but for now at least, it's gonna be a fairly sturdy one until I sort myself out and get into a rhythm I like.
It's gonna be tough, but life is all about choices, and how you make them. Why do they have to be so hard, and all seem so irreversible! It's like each choice is a new step forward, on a untrodden plain. You can't go backwards, so the only way to fix a bad choice is to keep going forward in a circle, forging a different path arcing back to the bad choice, fix it, then go off in a different path. No step can be fully reversed, only covered over, patched up. (takes off philosophical bullshit hat 
)