Oh, yes, I remember Office Hours

Filling in at my old job and am enjoying my "office hours" once again. I'm working, I've even already finished the main task that I was here to execute. But I'm also blogging, have balanced my check book and have emailed a few important emails that needed to go out. Office hours do quickly and easily turn into "Tiny Task Time."

In Christine Kane's blog and newsletter, she cautions about not letting email become an all day affair - that is, if it's open on your computer, it will be a distraction from other work and accomplishment. How many times do I swap tabs when I see that my email inbox goes from zero to one? Pretty often. And it's probably revealing that my inbox is in a near-constant state of zero. It's not that I don't get a lot of emails, but that I obsessively read them as they come in.

I'm going to throw email into a category of important, but not urgent tasks called "Tiny Tasks," which include organizing, scheduling, prioritizing and list making. These are relatively important and I will even argue that the are vital to me getting anything done, but I think that when I'm doing Tiny Tasks all day long, I'm not really accomplishing my larger goals.

I'm not sure where blogging fits - at work, on my work blog, that is, it's less of a distraction and more of a job, because I do need to do a little research and take the time to write something reasonably well thought out, but my personal blog...? Well, it's more for my personal entertainment, so it's probably not a task at all. That is, it's not on my To-Do list for the day, but more like taking a good friend's phone call.

In any case, I think I need to schedule Tiny Task Time and in that time, figure out what I should be doing during the rest of the day to accomplish my larger goals and to focus on items that are important but not urgent.