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[mirosurabu]

How do you organize your time?

I realized that with the way I've been doing it in the past, I won't be making progress anymore. So in order to prevent this I decided to change my work style.

New approach:

On a daily basis
60 min - Primary game
30 min - Secondary game
40 min - Blog and website
20 min - Marketing (if offline, then I'd take some more time)

Tasks are not necessarily following one another and I tend to have different activities in between. All activities take less than 3 hours. So far, I can say it's hard to adopt to this "rapid switching" scheduling style.

How do you do it?

[Bree]

I read somewhere that the human mind can focus on a single task for about 45 minutes before losing attention. I'll try and find it so that I don't look like I'm just talking out of my ass, but I do know that classes at schools are designed around this- it is at my school, anyway. Switching up tasks every so often and taking a timed break every now and then seems to be what works best for me.

I also use notepads for two very important things: One, I write down all the major things I need to get done. This gives me a sense of accomplishment when I do complete the task (Achievement unlocked!), so I can encourage myself to finish more. The other important thing I do is to take notes. I tend to get distracted by a really awesome idea I have for whatever I'm not currently working on. To solve this, I simply write out a quick note to remind myself and leave it for later. This gets the idea out of my system and onto paper, leaving my brain to refocus on the task at hand.

[Aik]

That would explain why I've been reading comics and forums for the past hour or so rather than working on this game/assignment...

Guh.

[Ivan]

I just read this article and thought it was pretty good:

http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/

[Alec S.]

Yeah, I've been trying to schedule my time to get as much work done on my projects as possible, and to get as much out of my free time that I'm not working on projects over the summer. 

I started with the lofty goal of two three-hour work segments each day seperated by hour breaks of something like playing a game or reading, rather than idly surfing the net as I often end up wasting my time doing (Or like I'm doing now  ). This ended up turning into one two-hour segment of time followed by a long amount of time trying to get back to work as I idly surf the internet  .

That 45 minute thing sounds interesting.  I think I'll try breaking up my time into 45 minute segments, see how that works out.

[team_q]

I just read this article and thought it was pretty good:

http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/

Thanks for posting this, I've had a hard time with distractions, I've got to develop some sort of focus, though I managed to get through that whole article without being distracted, I felt like I was challenged to do so.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

time is an illusion, don't bother organizing it. it's like trying to prepare for the afterlife.

[pen]

time is an illusion, don't bother organizing it. it's like trying to prepare for the afterlife.

But if time is an illusion, and you insert that into the ol' women are evil equation, women then becomes an illusion squared... Which puts an entirely new spin on the phrase "In your dreams, pal!".

[Klaim]

Until this year, I tried to work on my game as soon as I'm out of my dayjob and have spare time and have some idea/motivation/thinking about my game. What I was trying to achieve that way was to exploit spontaneous motivation times to work on the game, avoiding to "force" myself to work on the game.

It was not the more efficient way to do it, but it worked and the project was advancing slowly at least.

But since the start of this year, I added a new condition to this way to use my spare time for my game : make sure to achieve something (anything) at the time I'm exploiting spontaneous motivation.
Now the results are :
 1) I get more easily/often spontaneous motivation to work on my game : I know there is a "get things done" reward each time I can achieve something for my game;
 2) I achieve more work each time I'm back on my game : once a little thing is achieve it's easy to be tempted to continue working on more things to achieve - this one is known : the harder part is to "really" start working/to focus...

The other thing I do now that really helps "focusing" (as the excellent article mention, focusing is made of distractions...) : the first thing I do is to write on paper (ON PAPER, not in a TRAC/Mantis/Wiki/TextFile!!!) the list of tasks I have on the top of the mind that could be done in the time I'm starting to spend on game development.
Those tasks can be related or not, making me exploit the distracting power we now have from living with the internet, by starting with a task and sometime brutally stopping (in the middle of writing some code) and starting on another task (because i started focusing on it while doing another) and then getting back to the last task, etc.
The main rule I have to keep in mind is to not switch to other tasks than the ones on the list : they are all related to the game, allowing me to avoid changing mental context (random net-surfing make us change mental context very quickly)  AND I have said before that I will do those one and no other this time.


It makes me works a lot more than before on the game!

(but I'm not very yet at full speed I think)

[Greg Game Man]

haha what?

fuck schedules.. just do stuff

[Bree]

That was a really cool article, Ivan- it's nice to see someone actually examining new technology and not crying out that it's going to be the end of civilization. I find distraction to be a very useful creative tool- I've found myself getting frustrated from being too focused on a piece; often I'll have to move on to something else to finish it properly.

[Lucaz]

I've never organized my schedule. I just do stuff when I feel like it. Of course, having no obligations nor forced schedules, like job or stufies helps a lot on doing things that way.

Although a I've a kind of tacit agreement with my brother on the time I leave him the PC.

[Corpus]

time is an illusion, don't bother organizing it. it's like trying to prepare for the afterlife.

EDIT:   

[ness io kain]

I don't exactly have trouble organizing the time I devote to working on my games.

I have more trouble:


1. Not working on games.
Even though it's usually less work, life is not nearly as cool as game development.

2. Not neglecting specific projects.
A lot of the time I'll work on one thing way too much and something else won't get done. One would think that means I need to just work on one project at a time, but when that happens I lose interest. And then nothing gets done.

[Klaim]

2. Not neglecting specific projects.
A lot of the time I'll work on one thing way too much and something else won't get done. One would think that means I need to just work on one project at a time, but when that happens I lose interest. And then nothing gets done.

That's known as "active procrastination".

[mirosurabu]

And it's also a time-management issue.

My progress isn't that great, by the way. I have some real troubles adapting to this new working style. While I do well with other life activities, I do almost nothing game-development-wise.

[NiallM]

I think motivation's the key for me.  If I'm excited about something I'll happily spend every free moment I have on it.  If I'm not excited though I tend to do all sorts of things instead of working on it (and then feel guilty about not working on it, of course ).  Which means I tend to struggle with big projects, but find shorter ones far more satisfying (and successful).

Maybe if I could get into the mindset I have at work (where things just get done, regardless of whether I'm motivated or not) I'd find it easier.  But then I'm only making games in my spare time, and I don't think I'd want to be in work mode every waking hour.  Also, work is fairly mindless, and doesn't require the creative process in the way games do.