Day 30. By now I should be a single-tasking expert I guess. In fact, I feel pretty good at it indeed I plan to make a summary of all the mess in comments into a separate blog post, stay tuned!

BTW, having done something every day 30 days in a row feels both good and weird. I feel like I haven’t done anything like that in my life.. Even writing comments here 30 days in a row feels non-doable, not to mention the habit of single-tasking. Furthermore, I’m getting good feedback on increased productivity from my superiors (I didn’t even ask for it =).

It proves the concept and encourages me to take a new challenge. Not sure what’s it gonna be yet, but we have some ideas with my wife. Again, stay tuned

Anyway, after this period of 30 days, I plan to keep irregular updates on the single-tasking, especially if something does go wrong. I feel like it’s still very slippery and I’d rather not fall back into the doom of multi-tasking.

The bad thing about our IRC is that in our virtual company we must use it to kind of replace “being at your desk” in the office. That means:

• If you’re not on IRC, you’re not at work.
• If you’re not responding when called by name, you’re not at your desk.

So I can’t just ignore everyone or be offline all together, moreover I have to make sure my computer shakes when someone calls my name. Not using IRC or not responding to pings doesn’t work.

That means I must learn to control the conversation after it has started and identify quickly if it’s going to be a one minute chat or half an hour one. Before all of this (i.e. the single-tasking challenge) I used to quickly respond to question and then immediately switch back to what I’m doing and wait until my name is called again. I though it worked, but really after switching back I would anyway wander for a few seconds or even a minute. I still do it the same way, but I’m thinking that should be changed. In the real office when someone comes to you, you don’t work in between his sentences, do you? (Only in this virtual case, most likely the other party is doing the same in between my sentences)

But I propose this:

When someone texts me, before answering I should mark somewhere what exactly I’m doing right now (the task itself is usually a top thing in my TODO manager, so I would just have to make some notes next to task) and then start and finish the conversation. Very seldom it’s just a YES/NO question, but even if that’s the case – taking a notes won’t hurt, on contrary- it will help to focus better on that task at hand. The outcome of the conversation should be (1) a finished uninterruptible conversation if it takes < = 2 minutes, (2) a scheduled conversation if it would otherwise take > 2 minutes OR (3) a finished long conversation if it’s urgent and can’t be postponed. The great thing about it is that even if I have to go with 3rd option, I have notes on what I was doing before that so once this is finished, I can quite easily switch back.

So that’s my challenge for the next week. In the meantime, it’s weekend so I’ll keep you posted in couple days.