I love Cal Newport’s advice in general. For example, this video gave me an aha moment which made me realise why I’m so gosh darn mentally exhausted at the end of a work day.

I was context switching all day, and having work chat on (for eg slack) beside me all the time was literally doing my brains in. (And that constant desire to look at my damn phone… I feel like I may have to exile my phone from the home office from now on.)

But then, I feel like I couldn’t really apply his advice. Working in uninterrupted stretches of time is nigh impossible at some workplaces. For me to do so, I’d have to start work either much earlier than 9am or after 6pm, when everyone has clocked off.

During intense periods of times, I often do that, which doesn’t do well for me because I’m often expected to be “on” until 6pm, which means I could easily work up to 12 hours as a result.

Besides that, there’s also the way the project management software, Jira, is set up. I love Jira most of the time – it keeps teams accountable and helps us track our workload. Rather than an amorphous blob, my tasks are represented by tickets, and the project manager can easily see if someone is overloaded by seeing the number tickets someone is dealing with.

However, due to the fact that work is broken down into so many tickets, and discussions around work can still take place outside those Jira tickets in disparate places such as chats, meetings and more, one can’t help but bounce from one context to another in a frantic blur.

However, even Cal admits that his advice isn’t perfect, but “at least we know what’s the source of the problem so you can do something about it.” (Paraphrased).

So I’m pondering on how I can be managing my Jira tickets better.

I’m contemplating a few strategies (based on Cal’s advice). Say I have a task to update Product A’s documentation:

• Work on the doc, shut off all comms channels for an hour. Update Jira tickets once completed. (Context-specific task focus)
• Day-specific tasks. For eg, some days are full of meetings, which makes it challenging to get working on focus-specific tasks. So, to work on meeting-related work on that day only (such as writing reports) and have specific days to work on docs. (I know this is a luxury though, and most probably not possible).
• Work on focus-specific, writing-heavy tasks in the morning, more Jira/update docs in the afternoon.