Right, so I am going to write this on the 8th or the following weekend of every week for the rest of the year, mainly as a way to keep myself accountable.

Most people have goals during the New Year. I decided to take a different tack. My resolution this year is to create new habits. I am trying to learn to analyse my habits, how I work, what works for me, what doesn’t, and perhaps more importantly…

Understanding what motivates me, and what keeps me going.

One of the things I started last year after reading Monica Leonelle’s Write Better, Faster was to create a Google Form to track my work habits. This form had several purposes: to keep track of the time I was most productive, to understand how long I focused on specific interactions or actions, what kept me going, when I stopped, etc.

Looking back on the data is slightly embarrassing. This is not because the data shows me slacking off, but because I have not been as diligent as I should have been monitoring everything. However, it did come up with some interesting data sets.

And so I have resolved in 2016 to use those data sets to my advantage. I know that when dealing with mind numbing numbers, I tend to begin zoning out around the 20th minute mark. However, I can focus all my energies while I am there.

Then, when it comes to interacting with people, I have a bad habit of interrupting my current task to reply to them. However, since last year, I’ve made some improvements on ignoring my Skype and email to focus on the task at hand. A second monitor helps; I just shift my primary display to the secondary monitor, and then put the task I need to complete on the laptop monitor.

Of course, this sometimes backfires (like me not realising I have not checked my Skype in over 20 minutes for something that needs a fairly urgent reply) but overall I think it has helped me focus, somewhat?

Now, to figure out a way to minimise the amount of “blah” and “mrehhhs” when I write my emotions in the field.