The Only Hard Deadline is Coffee Time

Within 5 days of a deadline, the amount of work that I produce per day is at least double what I can usually produce on any other day. This is obviously a rough estimate, but the real figure wouldn’t be far off, if it was truly measurable. That means that every single other day outside of ‘crunch time’, I am leaving four perfectly good hours on the table. All the marginal gains and time efficiencies in the world won’t bring them back.

This frustrates me to no end. On a normal day, distant from any real deadlines, I do everything I can to get work done. I have all the basics covered:

• My ass is in the seat.
• I have work on my screen.
• I’m clicking away.
• My caffeine reservoir is full to bursting.
• I have secured a respectable 5.5-7.5 hours of sleep.
•  I have three or four goals written on a memo pad in front of me, so that must give me some points towards being ‘organised’.
• My computer is set up to lock me out of any website I’ve ever used to procrastinate.
•  I have religiously carried out my morning routine involving walking the dog and journalling about my goals and, or, concerning dreams.

One way or another though, guess what? I am still fucking around. I must be. Because I’m not getting half as much done as I would be if I was getting emails saying stuff like ‘today is the day’. That single nebulous threat makes more of a difference than every other factor combined.

I feel like physical tasks are easier for me to perform with urgency than mental tasks, even if they are equally menial. I remember back when I was painting fence slats, I would pull up a timer on my phone and hit ‘lap’ every time I finished painting one and moved it to dry. I’d aim to get under 15 seconds, then under 14 seconds, then under 13, and so on.

There was no hard deadline then either, but I think the physiological difference between throwing a paint brush around and sitting in a chair accounts for the difference in effort. When you’re really going for gold in a physical task, your heart rate is up, you’re breathing harder, you can work with a bit of a rhythm, and it keeps you in the zone – it is exercise. It’s hard to forget that you’re squeezing caulk between weatherboards. When you’re drawing in CAD or writing reports, though, the slightest distraction can make you forget exactly what you were doing. Even if the time cost to re-focus is short, it adds up.

The cruel thing is, even if I can focus entirely, that still doesn’t mean I’m moving fast. My hypothesis is that working at full capacity is closer to ‘fight or flight mode’ than a ‘flow state’. I can be totally zoned in on doing some brainless task 53 times, but without moving into a physiological state of urgency (like I do when I’m getting emails from builders saying ‘today is the day’), I’m still moving at half the speed I could be. There’s a chance that I just have psychological baggage from being berated for painting weatherboards too slowly, but for tasks that don’t require any thought, I’m convinced I should be able to move as fast as the computer can update the model. The limiting factor for getting a job out the door should not be the amount of effort I put in.

The easiest explanation is that this is a personal failing but there are a few things to rule out first:

• Switching tasks and distractions – would I achieve the desired amount of work if I simply didn’t switch tasks or leave my chair at all for extended blocks of time?
• Ill-defined tasks – Is it a case of not deciding what I’m meant to be focusing on in the first place? Trying to work through tasks that can’t be done without discussion and gathering new information?
• Some tasks can’t be done fast – Am I judging more open-ended tasks by the wrong metric (how many words I can write on something I don’t fully understand is probably less relevant in the early stages than how much I can read/watch on it?)