What’s your command center?

When I get the chance to peek at people’s computer screens, I do. It’s impolite but it’s interesting.

I want to see what they’re doing and which tools they spend most of their time on and organize their work from. In other words, what their command center is.

The answer usually is Gmail or Slack.

I think that’s partly because we have to communicate to get things done, and partly because these messaging tools are used as to-do lists.

The problem with the latter is that messaging tools are not very good to-do lists because they don’t keep us focused on our goals. Other lower-priority messages intersperse themselves, dilute our priorities and we forget what we’re even doing at our computer.

I want to always remember why I am sitting at my computer instead of being in the real world and want to concentrate on taking care of the tasks that keep me there.

That’s why I’ve recently (and finally) switched to organizing my day from a single note on which I have daily goals.

Not a different note every day. I want to see whether I actually do what I say I’m going to do. I try to set these goals when I’m feeling most optimistic and ambitious and then my more realistic self has to stick to them.

If I’m going to keep glancing at something over and over, I want it to be my day’s objectives, and ideally every time I glance back at the note I cross something off.

I also make sure that all the items on the list are things that I have complete control over. For example, I don’t know if I’ll be accepted into X or Y program, but at least I know that I can spend 2 hours working on the application and then send it off.

I control the amount of effort and the goals are measured in effort.

Writing a quick post today was one of these goals. Time to cross it off.