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Deciding my context

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?

sonia_simone's picture

Do you think it would...

Do you think it would work to decide that on a given day at work, you will do reading? (or writing, or research, or whatever) In other words, you make that decision of "what do I need to get done" the night before. Then you can bring a couple of options and crank your reading/writing/research out. It's artificial, but just setting up some walls for oneself can help sometimes.

I get the same way when I have too many options, I mentally fuzz out and go do something easy. One thing that helps me is the "10+2" hack where I set a timer for 10 minutes and do something I need to do, and then spend two (timed) minutes goofing off. After two or three rounds, I'm generally sufficiently into the work part that I don't need the timer to keep me on track. This is particularly useful to me for NAs that are tedious or otherwise unappealing.

 
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