Focus & Prioritize

Dec 14, 2004

I have been touched by one thing. Some of my clients have shown incredible trust in my capability even when I’ve delayed their work by weeks. This is a very enervative feeling because one, if you deliver a good service, people want it even if they have to wait, and two, I really have some potential and if I can better organize my schedule, I can do a lot better and do much more work.

OK, let me ponder over where I waste (not “waste” exactly, I’d rather call it “spend”) my time that affects my work. I love to learn and experiment. When something comes up that is useful in general but is not useful in particular, I end up spending a day sometimes on it. For instance in the morning I was working on a PHP program I had planned to deliver to my client by the afternoon. To test a few parameters, I needed to write a small function. While writing that function, I thought I could add many more features to it. Although I didn’t need those features (of course I’ll need them in my future projects) immediately, I ended up delivering the program late in the evening. This delayed the second work that I had planned to do in the evening. Even to complete the second work, where I should have spent two hours, I spent four hours because I found so much interesting stuff to read while researching for the work.

Focus. Prioritize. I think I should write these two words somewhere and put them where they are prominently visible.