Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
To make a Barren Tree bear Fruit
Having girt and tucked up your clothes, and having taken an axe or hatchet, approach the tree with resentment, wishing to cut it down: but when any body comes to you, and deprecates the cutting of it, as if responsible for a future crop, seem to be persuaded, and to spare the tree, and it will fruit well in future.
Thomas Owen, Agricultural Pursuits (a translation of Geoponika, 1805-6)
quoted in Lost Crafts: Rediscovering Traditional Skills by Una McGovern
Time flies when you’re… experimenting on yourself.
It was nearly two and a half months ago that I wrote the introductory post of the Grand Productivity Experiment, resolving to Do Something about my general state of disorganization and unproductivity before it brought my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.
(A note to those who haven’t been following this from the beginning: the introductory post outlines the first method tested. The Phase One post reports back on that and outlines the second method. And so forth.)
Two eggs, if you want me to be precise. Two sessions of 25 minutes was all it took for me to realize that while the Pomodoro Technique works wonders for some, it was not for me. There are two reasons for this.
One is that if I am doing lots of small tasks, even batched together, my focus is popping about from place to place anyway. Trying to remember a specific set of things which I am supposed to be focussing on without losing that focus is just too much. Plus I tend to forget that I’ve set a timer and just womble off doing things.
The other problem is that if I am doing a big job, I like to get stuck in and do a big chunk of it. The absolute last thing I need is an alarm interrupting me every half hour telling me to stop working. Starting is always the hardest bit: why build extra starts into your work?
