A Guide to Creating Internal Structure Without an Office Environment
In a situation like this where you are stuck at home without office structure to guide you. What are tips for creating an internal structure that you can live your life around?
The reality is the most successful structure that I see is external structure meaning can we put in place some more deadlines. If we were living a more normal life we would invite someone over for dinner and we would know we would clean our house before they came. Or we would plan a trip and all of our paper work would be done before we walk out the door. All of those things are gone now, I still think some of the keys to structure are body doubling and either blocking time or rotating thru projects.
I will explain. In the situation we are in today we could actually body double and block 4 hours to get something done and just be there to get things done. I hire body doubles sometimes and they might actually be studying the other room but someone is in the house and that makes me settle down and get the work done. So one option is to make an agreement with friends and they are like a body double. The Second one is to have a group of friends that you need to report back to regarding what you are trying to accomplish. The Third one is to have a plan for some kind of meet up for getting some exercise so the work needs to be done before you meet. (Another option with boring things is to shift between exercise and the activities that are not interesting.
About getting things done, I have two ways I encourage people to accomplish the activity at hand. I have to block big blocks of time. If you ask me to do something that is 40 minutes every day I really cannot do it that way. I can block a half of a day on one day and get it all done. Even when people what to study something or learn something that they have not been exposed to before I tell them to block the time once a week and then they will at least get started on the project.
Years ago I would do the boring things, 4 different things at a time. That was housework, expense reports, cooking and something that had to be turned in but was not creative. And what I would do is flip from one thing to another every 15 minutes. So today we would have multiple monitors and the reason for flipping was so my brain could think about boring task I had to do next and I could get it done much more quickly with the variety. That is another option, I also set a deadline for getting 4 or 5 of those things done in 2.5 hours. I could meet the deadline because there was a little bit of competitiveness in it.
Hope this helps, we will be doing other subjects as we move along on a regular basis. Hope you will join us again.