More on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
My trip to California last week gave me the time I needed to read all of Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. I was surprised at the number of ideas in the book I was familiar with.
- Dreyfus Model
- Logo – Seymore Papert
- Inner Game
- Getting Things Done
- Rubber Ducking
It was great to see them all put together in one place and brought together. I’m going to try and put some of the ideas in this book to use. Chapter 8 – Managing Focus really struck a chord. Lately I always seem to lose focus easily. I’m always jumping around from email to IM to my phone to my development tools and never really seem to accomplish much. One of the ideas that I immediately started doing was carrying a notebook with me at all times. It really helps to keep those ToDo lists on paper and out of my mind. I also immediately made a first pass thorugh my work email inbox and deleted a lot of clutter and started categorizing the other emails to tackle at a later time.
There are two things that I’m really struggling with. We are forced to used a program at work that limits the amount of time we are allowed to use the keyboard and/or mouse. Due to my level of typing I am seen as a High Risk for RTS and am forced to stop every 7 minutes to take a 10 sec break. This is really distracting when I’m in the middle of working out a problem. This pop-up comes up and I have to stop typing and cannot type for ~10 seconds. While 10 seconds doesn’t seem like long my mind immediately shifts to things I could get done in that time. I have to retrain my brain to stay focused during that time.
The other is a personal Wiki. At home I’m a Mac user. I like the ease of use of the plain-text wiki bundle for TextMate. But at work I’m forced to use a PC. I’d like to have one personal wiki for all of my thoughts and it would be great for it to be accessable to me wherever I am. I toyed with setting up a full blown MediaWiki that I could access from anywhere but it really just seems to be overkill.
I’ll write later about some of the other topics….especially Rubber Ducking.
