Method "Carrot-Gingerbread-Poker"

For more than ten years of my active search and application of GTD / PM-techniques in my own, almost a decade-long practice of freelancer and entrepreneur, it finally came to me - there is no silver bullet. Many people knew about it always, but it took me years. When for you the simultaneous number of projects is measured by more than one dozen. When you are a procrastinator so much so that even if you prokrastiynuyu this article from the work you manage to prokrastirovat procrastination by reading the letters of Leibniz and is ready to prokrastirovanie recursively. When you are a sixth-level perfectionist and romantic programmer, you hope to the last that there is a universal remedy. But it is not ...

It would be happiness, yes ... the long-term search for the philosopher's stone brought its fruit. I have accumulated a large chest of various approaches that I want to share.
')

In the late 1980s, Janet Evans completely dominated swimming among female drivers. Four-time Olympic champion. She is the owner of two world records, which were held for almost twenty years, which was an exceptional achievement for the postwar period. Was this the result of outstanding physical data? Not. For all the anthropometric indicators Janet was below average. But she was singled out technique. She swam in such a “freestyle” style that sports commentators taught: “Children, never swim like her.” And so no one swam. Not then, not now. But what did not fit all made Evans an outstanding athlete.

I give this small excursion into history with the aim of one important recommendation. Look for your technique, experiment. Do not refuse any approach just because it did not fit the majority. Even within the team, participants should be able to use their strengths. This is what can be called flexible. This is what I call "agile". When you have such a Janet in the team, they can hang a stone around their neck, and you can ... put flippers on their legs.

For example, the Pomodoro method is great for many, whereas for me it lasted four or five visits for a couple of hours in different contexts to check its comprehensive INAUTability. It turned out that for a person who can work several times a day according to the Tabata protocol, and between the series to go into hours-long "streams", this technique is completely inappropriate. And another - will bring great benefits.

I would also add that our will must eat as varied as our body. A diet of one, even a very useful product, will inevitably lead to an imbalance in the body. Feed her various dishes. And I want to present the recipe of one of them today.

Method "Carrot-Gingerbread-Poker"

The incentive system settled in HRM, time management and many other disciplines immediately and forever. Demanding something from yourself is better to pay for it. We pay for wakefulness with sleep. For a hard work week, you can pay off with a hosiery. Managers are racking their brains to motivate you for their amazing results in the last quarter. All these trade relations form virtual markets in which we sell what we can and buy, what we like.

Both for the real economy and for our domestic economy, difficulties in barter transactions are typical. How to sell the login form of a new project, on which you spent five minutes, for the summer courses of wind surfing? And the annual project that you finished today for a half-hour visit to Habr? So that the head does not burst from such unbalanced operations, mankind has invented a monetary equivalent - money.

The use of real money is too practical, which means that there will be problems in supporting impractical, absurd, fantastic goals for which we cannot pay now. And the means of payment will dictate the priorities. About which, using the example of the Eisenhower matrix, Stephen Covey wrote well before his bestsellers. Strategic issues that were categorized as important, but “not burning,” were drowned under the influx of important and urgent tactical tasks. Like a lumberjack with a blunt ax. Handing over the norm is becoming increasingly difficult, solving current logging tasks has to be made more and more intensive. There is absolutely no time to think about sharpening your tool. In this metaphor, someone can learn not only lumberjacks.

Take, say, the question of health. For many, it fades into the background until it falls into the category of urgent, and even urgent. Can we find venture capitalists who would be willing to invest their funds in it at the start? I doubt it. But we know that playing sports, for example, cannot affect our domestic economy badly. Most likely, we will increase productivity, increase the service life of our fixed assets, and so on. Profitable deal, without a doubt. But what if under such “infrastructure” projects we are not looking for external financing, but domestic? Let us, as the American Fed, print money and borrow it.

Primary issue

For this experiment, I took a bag of poker chips and carried out the "emission" of my personal currency directly to the desktop. On the left hand - free money supply, let's call it “bank”, by analogy with board games. On the right - own funds, let them be called "balance". All our actions are conventionally divided into important and all the rest. The first will increase your balance, the second - to reduce. They brushed their teeth - threw a chip for 5 units, did exercises - added 10 minutes, spent 15 minutes on a useless news site - paid off, invested an hour into the project of their dreams, which they put off for several years - got 60 or even 240.

When this idea first came to mind, I first laughed at her. But the habit of conducting experiments took her. Today I can already sum up the interim one and a half month result, that this is one and the most long-playing techniques in my long-term practice and, perhaps, the most effective. Yes, it looks like a parody of the economic system, but we would hardly integrate the complex into our everyday life. And her deliberate simplicity, however, encapsulates some fundamental principles. Time is money, and we have this capital. But you cannot get it right away or take a loan from a bank in order to invest in useful areas of our development. On the one hand, it is constantly lacking, on the other hand, it is often wasted. And this primitive game introduces objective numerical indicators, simulates natural trading processes, encourages evaluation, search for understanding and balance. I will share some practical observations.

Values

Do not force yourself to work on the system. She should work for you. If you feel that the balance is broken and there is a shortage of virtual finance for a pleasant one, do not try to solve this problem by will power. And even more so do not go on the way lies to himself. Just change the pricing. If earlier in an hour of productive work you gave yourself a hundred, raise the course to two hundred. Five minutes on Habré bought for ten - dumping to five.

It may well be that some types of activity that seem natural today, tomorrow will leave the "market" in general. When I actively worked for several hours in the new mode, I had an excess of “liquidity” on the balance of poker chips, enough to buy several hours of any, most senseless activity. When you have an indulgence on procrastination, it suddenly turns out that there is absolutely no demand for it. Thus, I reduced the empty visit to news sites to almost zero, and the free time was taken up by other ways of spending time. Which I did not expect at all, but they turned out to be much more interesting and useful.

The key task of the first stage is to grope values ​​and their quantitative indicators. Earn in the most different ways, the most bizarre spend. When the balance, following the golden rule of business, keeps around zero, the formed market value of one or another type of your activity can provide a lot of interesting food for the mind.

Difficulties

This approach helps to cope with complex problems. Often they serve as triggers for procrastination. It would seem that the method of solving them is extremely simple - to decompose the problem into subtasks of a smaller order. Until they become light enough for execution. A special case of decomposition - the so-called "first step". When an atomic shift is made, the final problem becomes smaller by that atom itself. As Gogol once answered Sologub, to whom “it wasn’t written”: “Take a pretty feather, make a good finish of it, put a sheet of paper in front of you and start this way:“ Something is not being written to me today. ” Poker approach stimulates such actions. I noticed that in order to convert the problem into chips, I subconsciously try to either break the task up into components, or break the first step “at least into one chip”. Almost constantly this first step detonates the whole chain.

Visualization

The work done is visualized. Let it be just stacks of chips, but their growth and each next transfer from the bank to the balance has a motivating taste. Sometimes an impressive amount of work done should have an effect on fatigue, but the opposite effect occurs. When in a state close to the flow, there is a desire to "cut more chips on the lung."

Balance

Cases and idleness can more effectively balance. There is time to work, there is time to rest. Much better than procrastination, when we essentially get stuck between work and rest without any benefit for both of them.

For example, I still had a carriage of childishness in me, which my three children teach me, and I love to play computer games. You cut the maximum level of difficulty, the tongue on the shoulder and away. Good time to communicate with sons and cleans well our neural networks. But in the tight schedule to find time for this kind of fun is not easy. And if they succeed, once a month, then more and more in a hurry. As if it was the last time.

About 5-6 weeks ago, I handed over a large project. Imagine yourself distracted during this period of the game was from the realm of fantasy, and then the output of a whole series of hits. I decided to conduct an experiment, the safety margin was, and introduced a simple poker plan. The chip of the minimum nominal balance for each micro-task in the project. For each such piece, you could buy either one game micro-quest, or N minutes in the game. Prior to the introduction of the method, the project was going at a normal pace and heavy workload. After the introduction, the pace accelerated significantly, more frequent entries were seen in the stream, Assasin's Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 (at the maximum, with almost all secondary tasks). New types of strength training, electronics classes with the middle son, some projects from the category “very necessary, but there was no time”, some old tails were closed to this.

When I previously ran into a barrier on any project, the risk of procrastination was entering the red zone. Now I can either honestly “pull” the accumulated funds without transactions with conscience, or, in their absence, earn on other tasks, be it sports, family, my own professional development and other proactive ways. On the one hand, this does not provide obvious ways to overcome the barriers mentioned. On the other hand, it creates a positive, healthy background without oppressive feelings of guilt.

What is our life? A game.

In all this process there is some gaming component. Some may be a minus, but I prefer to act "playfully."

By the very pomodoro

In terms of balance, the method is somewhat similar to the Pomodoro technique. With the only difference that the intervals of work and rest are formed adaptively. The system allows you to explore similar activities to us, the most successful of their ratio. At the same time, it encourages both long-term flows into the stream and dynamic interval work.

Team

I have not had time to conduct experiments with the team using this method, but I can already see some possible implementations. Almost always the team has unpleasant, but important projects that move with difficulty through the thickets of collective procrastination. And there are pleasant ones, and no less useful. Like that:

• Researches research for perspective and from the point of view of „tool sharpening“;
• Refactoring projects that are in a permanently emergency state. There is always not enough time to put them in order and they gradually begin to emit an eerie "code smell".
• New projects. From the category "I want and prickly." It seems to be a prospect, but so much has not been done on current projects.

There are a lot of examples, but most of these initiatives will be from the “important, but not urgent” category. The same priority issues hampering the strategic development that Covey mentioned. Only in team scale, enterprise scale. Attempting to balance different categories of projects with the help of the PPC method can give a very interesting quantitative and qualitative picture of both projects and team members ... and management. As the fall in my domestic demand for procrastination revealed new interesting directions for investing time, so your specialists can show themselves from completely new sides.

Summary

This pseudo-economic system, like the real one, cannot be perfect. There will be inflation, and the rising cost of certain activities and the crisis of overproduction. We'll have to regularly correct the balance in the "monetary" policy. If suddenly there are no "crises" - announce them. Raise sharply the prices of sports exercises for a week, and in a month do the same for projects that are stored on your “mezzanine”. Rate the results, feel your reaction.

I am still very far from a comprehensive study of this method. But while I have completely positive emotions on the results of the application. Join, experiment, share and thank you for your patience.

Taking advantage of the moment, I wish you to become the masters of your time in the New Year. So that your “economy” shows steady growth and efficiency :)