~/diary/Clean Desk
Updated Feb 25, 2021

🖊 Clean Desk Thursday, Feb 25, 2021

The first 6 weeks of 2021 have been a little rough. I was spinning my wheels, I felt I was not accomplishing anything.

The last couple of weeks have been great.

M. mentioned how he cleans his desk when working on a particular thing. My physical desk is always clean. But my virtual one wasn’t. I was used to working with everything open: multiple messaging apps, multiple browsers with multiple tabs, multiple note-taking and TODO lists, …

Every alt-tab is a chance to get a glimpse of something that causes an interrupt and a heavy context switch.

So I started cleaning my desk and allocating time to work on just one thing. And it’s fantastic. (Duh!)

I’m also trying a new scheduling algorithm:

Morning: correspondence, one-off urgent small tasks, meetings

Afternoon: single-task focus work (clean desk, everything closed and all notifications off)

Evening: reading, browsing, learning, small pleasant tasks

I do this Tue-Fri. Monday is special and it’s reserved for big errands and tasks as well as planning small and big tasks for the rest of the week.