I am a single processor machine.

It’s been a busy week. First there was my visit to Microsoft. This was immediately followed by a fantastic BarCamp which I still haven’t had time to properly review. Sunday involved birthdays and a trip to Discovery Bay to see a Betsy’s newborn. Finally, Monday through Wednesday, William and I ran another iteration of our Rich Internet Applications workshop, primarily for PCCW employees. Now it’s been two days to try and recover from 6 days worth of email backlog.

All of this activity has once again revealed my rather poor multi-tasking abilities. When things bottleneck, I tend to thrash my schedule. Rather than accept that some things will be late and focus on getting the most important and urgent items done, I tend to do a little on a lot of different tasks, which leads to getting nothing done.

I’ve made several attempts at improving this situation, some of which are working out for me and some of which I need to either re-evaluate or renew and redouble efforts. For example, I now tend to process my email in batches. This may mean I’m a little slower to respond, but I also spend a lot less time handling email.

My ideal scheduling process looks something like this:

• Process email in emacs gnus.
• Use the awesome emacs org-mode to manage a local to-do / task list. New items can be added to the list quickly while processing email.
• Small or truly urgent items get handled immediately, otherwise they get put into the queue for processing that evening.
• At the end of the day, review what I did and report the activities into our basecamp site as a way to record my activities and communicate them with my team.
• Review the new tasks created that day, assign them to a project, priority or schedule.
• Finally, make a plan on what I’ll do the next day during my three main working sessions (morning, afternoon and night).

That’s the plan at least. One of the main goals is to reduce distractions and stay in control of my time. In the larger picture, I’m also reducing the amount of travel I do. Again, less interruptions in the schedule.

We’ll see how it all works out.