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Productivity Thing

5 years ago1,507 words

I built this tool for myself a while ago, which is supposed to help with productivity by allowing me to track what tasks I do and when. While it's not exactly working wonders - I've been feeling awful for weeks and have done barely anything, and all it's done is made that clear - recently I've had a few good days that aren't too embarrassing to include in a screenshot!

Mostly I just wanted to replace the previous post with something else! Stepping away from all that for the past few days has helped my mental health a lot, as has actually deciding on my next project and working on a prototype for that. I feel at my best when I'm making something. I want to talk about this new project since I think it's quite interesting, so I'll likely post about that on the Alora Fane blog as soon as I can actually finish writing a post about it (I've not exactly been in the right frame of mind for writing anything for a while - even writing this is a struggle).

For now, I just wanted to talk a little bit about this tool I've been using for the past few weeks. I've made it for myself so it's not as if there's a public version to play around with, but maybe it'll be mildly interesting to read about anyway.

It consists of two parts. The main one is this task list, based on one I had when making Taming Dreams a few years ago, where I can add specific tasks with a pretty coloured icon, importance indicator, and estimated completion time.



When I want to start one, I press the play button, and it lights up in its colour. When I'm done, I click the tick, and it's removed from the list and added to the graph which I'll talk about in a minute. Most of them are very specific things for my current game project; there were a bunch of ones for Sindrel Song that wouldn't make sense to anyone but me, like "Edit that bar about Dolour/Duhrge in Memody's song". These made up the 'to do list' I've mentioned a few times.

Every day, though, several daily tasks are added to the list, as seen in this screenshot. These are things I feel I should do every day, and I thought adding them to this might encourage me to do so... but I've not had much luck at all with that really. I just end up deleting most of them uncompleted every day. Still, adding things like 'meditate' and 'exercise' might have effectively encouraged me to do those at least a little bit; I managed to do them every few days now instead of never. I think aiming to draw and compose music every day is a bit much though; maybe I'll set it up so they appear on some days but not others. Also I know the icon for 'Piano' is a guitar; it was the only instrument in this icon set. I lose sleep over that, every night. It torments me.

Speaking of meditation, I actually composed a couple of pieces of music to help with that, and they do help a lot, as they focus on exactly counting breaths with the beat, unlike the usual aethereal new agey ambience you find if you search for 'meditation music'. Maybe I'll upload them to YouTube or something at some point.

I can also mark my mood using a seven-point scale (those coloured circles), independently of the tasks. It's interesting tracking this, though I usually just use the middle three: neutral, slightly positive, and slightly negative. I suspect my 'neutral' is probably a whole lot more miserable than the average person's neutral mental state, but I suppose it's all relative. So blue should be taken to mean 'miserable, but no more than usual', while purple is 'worse than usual' and green is 'some of the darkness has cleared a little bit'.

The completed tasks and recorded moods are shown on this graph for every day:



These were three actually good days, where I started on and largely completed a working prototype of my new game. The gold blocks are for that (they're of the work/coding category). My mood was also less poor than on most days; for the past couple of weeks before this, it was mostly purple, or worse, and there are even a few greens this time, wow! They're rare. I've noticed they're entirely dependent on the music I'm listening to in the background.

I've been trying to determine what the ideal number of work hours per day is. Based on research, I've decided to aim for six, with eight as a 'stretch goal'; the teal bars at the top show my progress towards this daily goal (it fills at six, and fills a second time at eight). Perhaps that doesn't sound like too many compared to the people who claim to work like 18 hour days or whatever, but this only counts actual focused productive work; procrastination and messing around isn't included in the total (it's what I was doing during those blank parts). Things like meals are marked on the graph, but they don't count towards the time total; only work-related tasks do.

My daily routine has been sort of odd since I had radiotherapy back in January. Back then, I had to wake up really early to go to the hospital, and I liked the feeling of having the whole day ahead of me, so I stuck with it. Now, I wake up at like 5ish and mess around on my phone for an hour or so before having breakfast at around 6ish. I have two other meals, a 'main' one - like the one most people have in the afternoon and have different names for (dinner, tea, crumpsmet, etc) - is somewhere between 10am and noon, so then I can have more energy to focus for the rest of the day, with a smaller 'lunch' sort of thing later... or at least that's been the theory. I tend to have an active morning but 'crash' in the afternoon, though, quite consistently, so it doesn't seem to be having its intended effect. Perhaps I should try swapping those around to see if having the smaller meal earlier might avoid this crash? That's something I wouldn't have thought to do if not for recording everything I do like this.

I also only have a shower every third day because I never see anyone so what's the point.

I made this thing 37 days ago (according to the archive), towards the end of Sindrel Song's development. I'm wondering whether having it to record specific tasks for my new project might help keeping development on track, but we'll see. The one I had for Taming Dreams did help a lot! If nothing else, it feels like what I do has more weight or significance, even when it absolutely doesn't, if I can record it like this. That in itself is motivating, especially since I don't exactly have anyone to talk with in the real world.

I've considered making it public so then the feeling of eyes on me might make me more inclined to use my time well, but the idea feels really uncomfortable, like deciding to live in a glass house or something. So I'm not going to be doing that.

I've also considered making it into an phone or web app that other people could use, but it's so specific to my needs and there are so many other similar apps already out there that it doesn't really seem like the best idea. I've used a bunch of similar apps over the years, but never stuck with them for various reasons. Making one myself means I can tweak it to be exactly as I need it to be, plus it feels like I'll have wasted my time if I don't use it...

If you go to school or have a job, you wouldn't have to worry about things like this because your routine is already largely determined for you. I miss having that, not having to plan everything out myself and use things like this just to motivate myself to stick with anything. It's tough when you don't have deadlines or classes or meetings to attend at certain times.

So yes, now I need to get around to "Look into press release stuff"... It's looking likely that Sindrel Song's release date might be delayed again because that's proving particularly tricky. Lots of unfamiliar things to figure out.

(Hmm, back when I made Taming Dreams, I was aiming to do a number of 90-minute sessions per day, with breaks between them. Things have been more hectic while recovering from the surgery, so planning something so specific wouldn't have worked. I might give it a try now though, see how that affects how much I get done in a day.)