Productivity
🤔
I got a bit more clarity on the idea of task urgency in the Eisenhower Matrix. I realized urgency is tied to how soon a task is due. But not every task has the same kind of due date. Some are more like a deadline and others like an expiration date. I’d like to create a few rough categories to describe the type of due date. I’ll combine the due date type and an estimated start-by date to calculate a rough urgency score. Then when I’m prioritizing my tasks, I can sort by that score to narrow down my options. Once I’ve added all that, the next step is to analyze the idea of task importance.
In my schedule tracker I added some time quotas for my work projects. It’s easy to let my higher priority projects get crowded out by lower priority tasks. A suggestion from my boss about deep work targets based on his own schedule tracking reminded me I already do that with my personal projects, aiming for 5 to 10 hours a week, so I added a similar feature for work, aiming for 5 hours a day. It’s been enlightening watching myself fall short.
History
🙂
I learned some European history from a book by my friend Tim. He wrote a mini-biography of St. Patrick as a personal project and gave me a spiral-bound copy, complete with his beautiful hand-drawn maps and calligraphically lettered royal family tree. It was interesting to put the pieces I’d heard of Patrick’s life in context, and I enjoyed tracing his movements on the map of the island. But for me the most valuable part was the appendix on the history and geography of Europe in the 400s when Patrick lived. History has always felt like an impenetrable mass of irrelevant details, and it’s been a lifelong quest to find some connection with it. Tim’s appendix condensed the right sized chunk of history into the right level of summary to paint a satisfying picture of what happened and why—in this case how the Western Roman Empire gave way to Germanic successor states. Reading the progression of events and following them on the maps also brought me another step closer to my project of finally learning geography, which is feeling more important as more of the world crowds into my news feeds.
How cool that you have that bio of St. Patrick!