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Deciding my context
Jamie Phelps | Feb 24 2006
I am a graduate student (about to return to undergraduate but that's a different story) and I have two student worker jobs on campus, all of which gives me a lot of discretionary time and that is really dangerous for me. My work duties and both jobs never take more than an hour to complete and the rest of the time is basically just being there to answer the phone, answer questions, etc. I also spend a lot of time at my local Einstein's Bagels shop in the mornings. Ostensibly, all of this discretionary "free" time would help me GTD, but I find that I have a huge difficulty naming my context. For instance, @Work could mean reading that reading assignment for class, doing my Greek translation, writing code, pissing away time online, research on the library's site, writing some on my four term papers that aren't due until the end of April, learning Croatian, posting on board.43folders.com. I think you get the idea. So, when I sit down at work or Einstein's, I have so many options of what to do that I usually go with pissing away time online since my school's wireless internet reaches to Einstein's. Even without the internet, I can find a way to piss away two hours in a hurry. So, how do you identify what it is exactly that you should be doing in ambiguous contexts? Or am I making this into something it's not when I should just be more conscious of the issues I mentioned above? 10 Comments
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 I'm also a grad student...Submitted by Sosaidh on February 24, 2006 - 3:03pm.
I'm also a grad student and while I don't necessarily have discretionary time, I do have several ongoing projects and have to pretty much plan my own day. I think you might have the same problem that I have in that I don't have my supervisor constantly breathing down my neck and telling me when I need to do things. What I try to do to resist the temptation to use my so-called "down" time in a useless fashion is to stage a mock review with myself at the end of the week to keep track of how I am on accomplishing my goals. What I will do is at the beginning of the week, I sketch out a rough plan on what I want to accomplish that week. Then at the end of the week, I go over my weekly plan and compare that to what I actually did accomplish during the week. I ask myself if I met my weekly goals, or if I didn't was the cause that I didn't plan properly, that I over extended myself, that something more urgent came up and needed my immediate attention or that I didn't use my time properly (e.g. did I spend time surfing the internet that I could have spent reading research papers). Then I try to fix the problem if it is fixable when I sketch out the plan for the next week. I'm not sure if this helps or not. :) » POSTED IN:
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