About Thanksgiving and Gratitude (Rev. Anshi Daigi Zachary Smith)

Work on it in the morning before your work day. Do something on it every day. Minimize startup and switching costs. Put your main life on autopilot. Combine tasks from your work life and personal life to get more done quicker and better Only do side projects you are absolutely crazy about. Be consistent, Do something every day and mark it off on a calendar and Don’t break the chain. Be honest with yourself. 1. Work on it in the morning before your work day: I have been doing the first suggestion, working early, and I love it. It takes a bit of discipline to go to bed and get up early but being up when everyone else is sleeping and meditating, writing in my journal and then getting to work, even if for only half an hour, has really been working for me. That’s mainly when I get the writing for this blog done. 2. Do something on it every day:  That’s one I’m working on, some days go better than others but setting the goal of doing it every day without breaking the string and lettingyourself down seems like a good idea. 3. Minimize startup and switching costs: This is an interesting one, and here’s I’ll quote from someone who gave some good answers: Kah Keng Tay, Quora Engineer answered: I try to minimize startup and switching costs, in other words, the time it takes to get started working on the side project. This way, even if I only have a few minutes to work on it before I turn in for the night, I can still do something useful. Also, I try to make each opportunity count. These are hard to come by and so it is good not to waste any single minute. This boils down to me doing some or all of the following: Keeping as much state persistent across sessions as possible. I leave all my editors, browser windows, etc exactly the way they are so I can pick up and resume where I left off. This means I usually never shut down my computer, preferring to put it to sleep or standby where possible. Having a quick and painless to-do list. I used to do this in a text file butI’ve recently started to use Evernote for this. Then, when secondary tasks crop up that are not central to what I’m doing right now, I’ll put them on the list and work on them later. Biting off only what can be chewed. Related to above, I make sure I tackle only what seems reasonably possible within the time I have. If I took on too big a task and didn’t manage to finish, and only got back to it a few days later, I would have forgotten by then some of the reasons why I did things in a certain way. This would cost me time that is spent rethinking and refactoring my design unnecessarily. Prioritizing tasks according to what is important (or interesting if I’m not feeling particularly inspired). This goes in line with making each opportunity count. In downtime, I would transfer some of the tasks in the lightweight list into something more persistent for issue tracking and prioritizing. I found Trac with a Git or Mercurial plugin to be pretty useful for this purpose, and it helps me tokeep focused with the big picture in mind. Having near-term milestones. These are helpful to stay motivated and gives you some pressure to keep on-track with your goals. I think it’s easiest to just have a single feature in mind and a fixed date that you want it finished, and use that to inform your decision making. Deserializing in advance mentally. The concept of serialization in computer science refers to storing state in a form that can be persisted. In the case of a side project, between the times you get to work on it, your ideas and thoughts often live in your biologically memory, probably in medium- to long-term storage. I’ve found that it takes time to get all that back into the forefront of your thinking and creative process, but it’s a waste if that time could be spent actually working on your project. Instead, I’ll spend my commute doing that deserialization, mentally getting ready a list of things I’d be able to do right away once I get home. He’s laying this stuff outfrom a software engineer perspective but I like this advice a lot. I do things like this with music where I keep a list of small tasks I need to do and then try to check them off in quick batches if I have a half hour to work.  These can be things like ‘group all your melodies into a bus and then add some sidechaining off the kick’  It takes a few minutes, is kind of boring but will make things sound better. I don’t have to be in a creative zone to do this and can jump in quickly while I’m waiting for something else. 4. Put your main life on autopilot: It’s hard to get music projects done if your day job or family life are exploding and going crazy. Be strategic and don’t launch big crazy stuff in multiple areas of your life at the same time if possible.  Try to keep some areas on a lower simmer so you can really push on whatever your project is. Example: don’t plan to have a baby and finish an album or go on tour at the same time. Very difficult, trust me. 5. Combine tasks from yourwork life and personal life to get more done quicker and better: This is a big big huge one for me. Since I started teaching at Dubspot a LOT of the music I end up finishing comes from ideas I start in class in front of a group of people. I’m not sure why this works but I think it has to do with the fact that knowing there’s an audience makes me focus a bit more and try to make something awesome.  That detail aside it’s worth seriously looking at your job to figure out if you can find a way to blend in some of your project in a way that’s not going to get you fired.  This could mean working from home, changing jobs to something that supports your project or finding a job with downtime built in where you’re allowed to read, write or work on side stuff.  It’s hard to find a job where you can work and make beats at the same time so I am quite lucky in that regard. 6. Only do side projects you are absolutely crazy about: I think this one doesn’t need a lot of elaboration. What I’d sayperspective on not taking on new stuff because when I look at the calendar there’s no space for it. It also helps me keep perspective on if I am actually getting done the stuff I promised myself I would. That ended up being a fairly long post, I hope there was some value in it for you.  Let me know if the format works or is weird, I think I’m going to make a little series out of these using stuff I find on Quora as a jumping off point. If you’re on Quora come connect with me, I’m Matt Shadetek.  Do you have any strategies like this that you use to get your stuff done? You can check out the whole question thread with more good ideas in on the Quora site.