Semantici.st

I have a dirty little secret. Admitting it in public could subject me to ridicule and potentially even hurt my future career prospects – but I’m going to do it anyway.

I’m really apathetic and lazy.

Okay, for some people who know me that’s not a secret – I do, after all, own the ‘apathy.org.uk’ domain name. It has been, however, absolutely debilitating in the past. My complete inability to muster the will to do anything is the main reason why I have thousands of pounds of student loan debt and no degree. It’s also stopped me from ever implementing the cool ideas that I think up.

It doesn’t stop me from being productive in the workplace, where our metrics consistently show that I’m pretty much awesome. I think the difference is that in my day job I can’t just totally slack off – it would be noticed quite quickly and I’d be out of a job. I can’t allow myself to choose the ‘meh’ option, and I suspect that being aware of my own tendency to be lazy I work harder so that I can’t be accused of it.

But there’s so much more that I want to do other than just my day job. I have ideas for fun web apps, I have work that needs doing for Xybur (not least of which is to make a site that’s not quite so horrific), I have fiction I want to write, and I need to start making progress towards a personal robot-building goal I set myself. Some of these things are chores and are easily put off, but most of them are fun to do and will have fun or interesting end results. Either way, they’re not getting done.

I feel that technology may be the answer.

In this specific case, I think that some sort of ‘project management’ system is in order. If I just needed to handle organising tasks, I’d use Basecamp or something similar, but I need something a little more unusual. I need something that can present a small task which I can do in a set amount of time. I think I’ll be able to muster up the motivation to get something done if I can get a single complete task that’s achievable in a relatively small amount of time. I can say, ‘hey, there’s an hour before I need to go to bed – maybe I should do something productive instead of reading the Cheezburger network’, and it will provide me with a thing that will take an hour.

Almost every project can be broken down into tasks and sub-tasks, and my goal for this is that no task should take more than two hours to complete to a reasonable standard. There might be more work involved in polishing, but at this point I’d be happy to lower my standards in order to actually finish something. Craig has rightly pointed out that estimation by time is error-prone, but in this context it doesn’t actually matter if I underestimate how long a task will take. These projects don’t have deadlines or cost allocations, so I don’t need to show these time estimates to anyone else. Once I start on a task I’ll keep working on it, even if it takes twice as long – I don’t have a problem with that. If I were doing this for my day job (were we already have one hacked-together project management system and really don’t need another) or for billable work, the complexity estimates Craig suggested would probably be better.

I have nice add-on ideas for this system. One day, I’d like to be able to contact it over IM, Twitter, or email and have it send me a thing to do (handy for lunch breaks!). It’s tempting to start hacking together IM and Twitter bots, but that would be a mistake. It can be patched in later once I have the core functionality. Hell, I can even make it the first project on the system. One concept from my IM/Twitter bot idea which I definitely do want to include right from the very start is the idea of having the system return just one task rather than a list of appropriate tasks. If that task isn’t suitable for some reason I can hit ‘skip’ and have it pick another, but if I’m presented with a list I know that I’ll just spend my time scrolling up and down the list and not actually doing anything that’s on it.

On the one hand, it is absurd that I need to trick myself into doing work like this, but on the other, more pragmatic, hand, it doesn’t matter what stupid things I need to do as long as I produce results. If a silly ‘project management for lazy people’ system results in me completing even one project, then it’s time well spent.

Of course, there lies the problem: I need to implement the system first before it can help me. I don’t believe that there’s anything technically difficult about it, and it’s a weekend. If I can avoid Christmas shopping and Fallout 3, I might just be able to get it started, and if I can just get it started that might be enough to overcome the crippling inertia of apathy.

I hope it is. If it is then, with any luck, I should have a lot more interesting things to write about here.