topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Thursday March 28, 2024, 6:19 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Author Topic: Ice Bath Method  (Read 4087 times)

Paul Keith

  • Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 1,989
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Ice Bath Method
« on: November 05, 2009, 06:08 PM »

Source: http://calnewport.co...to-painful-projects/

The Ice Bath Method
   1. Start with a half hour brainstorming session. Go somewhere interesting, armed only with pen, paper, and caffeine. (Dog optional.)
   2. Later that same day, use the results of your brainstorming to set the foundation for one hour of hard focus.
   3. Wait until at least the next day to do your first multi-hour push on the project.

Sample:
A Difficult Talk

Bailey Next week, I’m giving the Theory Colloquium lecture here at MIT’s computer science laboratory. This means I’m facing one of the most common and most dreaded tasks of academic life: writing a talk.

Constructing good talks slides is grueling. The task is not so large that it can become a harmless background task in your life, and it’s not so small that it can be dispatched in a single inspired dash. In other words, like all medium-sized hard projects, it’s a catalyst for procrastination.

Here’s how I’m handling it…

A Morning Brainstorm

This morning, I brought a notebook, a cup of coffee, and my dog, Bailey, out into the courtyard of my apartment building. I spent a half hour under the shade of a tall maple tree working out the big ideas of the talk while simultaneously frustrating Bailey’s life ambition to fully devour a tennis ball.

Then I put the work aside and did something else.

Later this afternoon, when I arrived at my office on campus, I spent another hour building the slides for the first 10 - 15 minutes of the talk.

And that was it for today.

Tomorrow I’ll make a hard push to finish a full draft of the slides, leaving almost a full week for my standard cycle of practice talks and polishing.



housetier

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 1,321
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Ice Bath Method
« Reply #1 on: November 05, 2009, 08:54 PM »
Sounds like a reasonable and workable idea to me.

I did something similar for my finals: the exams were held from 8am to noon, so in the 2 weeks before I studied from 8am to noon and then stopped for the rest of the day. The day before the exams began I did not study but went to the movies. With such little effort I was among the best in my class.

That said, I really believe that method described in the OP will work (at least it will work for me).