Well, things did not go as planned.

A quick overview of my day,

- 2 hours' work

- 20 min break

- 1 hour work

- 1 hour lunch

- 30 minutes to be guilted into going to a pet store 30 miles away by my partner

- 5 hours stopping in every shop to and from said pet store

- having said that i did sit outside a couple of them and got 40 mins of work done in my emergency work notepad.

- 1 hour unpacking shopping i didn't want to do in the first place

- 2 hours winding down from stressful shopping

- 1 hours' work

- 10 min break

- 2 hours' work




Totals:

[ 7 hours' work ]

[ 30 min designated breaks ]

[ 5 hours wanting to end it all ]

[ 3 hours avoiding work ]




All in all not a terribly unproductive day, i got most of my design down and worked through a few issues with it.

At first i though that I'd wasted lots of time, but when i note the work I'd done there was actually quite a bit.

Analyzing how i spend my time is an interesting exercise, I've come across a few things i never noticed before such as how large a proportion of work i get done after the first 30 minutes of work. I've heard tell of people being in the zone but never really thought about how it applies to my working. Turns out that i only work about a 15% as well during the first half hour of any session.

Kind of like a warm up.

Another thing i noticed is that once my concentration is broken it's really hard to go straight back into work, i think this is because once I'm bumped out of my zone i feel anything I'm doing afterwards is such an uphill battle it's not worth it.




A few things came out of today, namely that i need to work in blocks of more than an hour to get any serious work done but 4 hours is difficult to maintain.

So I'm going to be working in 2.5 hour sessions to see if this makes it easier, however I'm only counting 2 hours of this as actual work time and allocating 30 minutes per session as warm-up time.

From a design point of view I've been struggling to work at a higher level than normal. as i previously said i usually work with a much generality and flexibility as possible, which is very useful in its own way but does not necessarily lend itself to quick prototyping design. Especially difficult is my own personal need to make everything as agnostic/modularized as possible, i have fighting goals of speed and re-usability and the more complex re-usable design is winning(despite my best efforts to the contrary).

Still got an hour and a half of day left so i may yet get some work done.

Here's to unencumbered hope




Any one got any tips on how to move from a very structured design methodology to a freestyle rapid prototype working philosophy? because to be honest change is hard.




Footnotes:

Q10 editor is amazing for writing these entries, hands down the best text editor I've ever used.

I'm using pivotal tracker to map out some of my programmatic goals but I'm finding it hard to map design ideas to individual tasks as the moment, hopefully this get easier as i move away from design and more into programming.