Making my work boring - Workflows

 

In listening to Cal Newport's Deep Work podcast and reading his book Deep Work, he has a point about making work boring so that we can free up cognitive space to be creative. In asking our brains to address the questions How am I going to do this? What needs to be done next? etc. we're wasting cognitive load on answering questions that have little to do with our actual work. 

To this end he suggests explicit workflows or processes for tasks you regularly complete. For this term I am slowly building these workflows, based on my ideal schedule for Spring 2021, below. 

In setting up my ideal schedule I think about what I want to spend time on, and when to NOT to schedule time. In being chairperson of my department there are a good number of days I have to focus my time and attention on something that comes up. This term I've added -0- to my schedule to be a placeholder for working on those emergent tasks.

From my ideal schedule I've been writing them in my journal (see The Time-Block Planner Feedback) and then adjusting my schedule as needed. Hopefully I'll be able to identify when my ideal schedule broke, and then create a new one for Fall 2021 with the lessons I've learned this term.

For each of those items in my ideal schedule I created the following text files to capture what I do during those times. 

A good number are blank, but over the break I thought about a few of them, below. Email is something Newport talks a LOT about, so I thought it would be good to solidify what I do first and make sure I only check email a few times a day. (I've since kept it open, but just mute the tab.)

This is how I grade quizzes, including my rubric. 

For office hours a good amount of the time students are not there, but I do need to take time to reach out to students. 

In doing this I keep feeling like I am programming myself, which on the surface seems to run counter to what academics would seem to prize; thinking about the world. Yet, what do I want to use my limited brain power on, the little or the big things?

It also feels nice to put these things down somewhere, knowing I can come back to them in the future and make them better. Maybe I learn enough AutoHotKey or Python to automate a good amount of what I do? Maybe I realize I dislike doing some of these tasks and find ways around them? Maybe I just iterate on them term over term, and come to a place of peace that I can't improve every task... Yet.