You might start a day with the best of intentions, but sometimes it takes just a few things for it to go off the rails, and the best thing to do is just accept the loss and move on rather than making it worse beating yourself up about it.
I have great difficulty achieving focus at the best of times, but one day this week I spiralled as one thing or another distracted me. It wasn’t anyone else’s fault, it’s just how the day is sometimes, but it reminded me of a few things to keep in my head when I need to focus: a realistic plan for the day, being in the right place (quiet, well lit, cool), not overcaffeinating and staying off social media. It’s early days in my Master’s studies, I’m finding my rhythm, but this is supposed to be a part-time degree, I need to fit it around work, and I’m aware that given my interest in the subject (which often means wanting to broaden my focus, read around and go down rabbit holes when I should be doing the set reading) and my propensity for distraction, I need to set the right conditions and have my act together.
One of the things I’ve been working on since I started my Master’s degree is getting my act together – the workflow for notes and reading, and the tools to organise it all:
- Note-taking in pencil in an A4 notebook.
- Note-making, fleshing out those class notes, in Notion. Notion is a great note-making tool, gives you a hell of a lot for free without hassling you, and has a nice class notes template. It even allows for a limited number of AI queries, such as summarising my own notes back to me, which helps me to shake things loose and check that I’ve been clear.
- Expanding some of these notes further in this blog (if I have to think about how I’m expressing something for a reader that might not be me, It’s helping me to get something much clearer in my head).
- Using Windows Voice typing and the dictation feature in Microsoft Word – automatic dictation has all got so much faster and more reliable.
- Saving bookmarks and reading from the web in the brilliant Raindrop – again, it does a lot for free (the reasonable paid version, which I have splashed out for, does also have some clever AI-powered bookmark sorting features). I’ve used various bookmark managers in the past, from the now-defunct del.icio.us through Diigo to Pinboard and Pocket, and Raindrop is the best. I love it.
- I’m also trying out Zotero and MyBib to collect and organise research and manage citations – early days, but I can see how one of them might become indispensable when I get going with larger pieces of work.
- I’m checking my spelling and grammar with LanguageTool, a good alternative to Grammarly, which has become unusable thanks to constant pestering to upgrade to its Pro version.
- The Pomodoro Technique is good for time-boxing and focus, and there’s a very handy timer built into Toggl (which I normally rely on for timing freelance work)
Resilience Food Stories has some lovely films, including one featuring Carolyn Steel that really helped me to understand my focus on food systems change. They’ve just updated with several new ‘stories’ featuring figures from food and resilient farming in the UK, from Patrick Holden to Dan Saladino.
We dropped in to Tavistock briefly yesterday and took a look at the Goose Fair, known locally as the Goosey. We saw two geese.