Today I gave myself a bit of a luxury day, choosing to stay at home and think about doing work more than actually getting on and doing work. That might sound as if I was bunking off work completely, but by removing myself from the mundane churn of everyday work tasks and the myriad distractions of my normal working environment, I was actually able to think about a bunch of more creative projects that I have had in my head for ages but which never quite managed to translate into action. And whilst I still haven’t made a real start on any of them today, I was able to re-define each one as a smaller ‘micro-project’ which, being smaller, less ambitious and not the whole darned big deal of a final output can now actually stand a chance of getting done.
For a while now I have been thinking that one reason my big creative projects don’t get done (don’t even get started) is that they are just too big, too daunting, too unachievable. It’s not so much that I don’t have any time to work on them, but rather that I don’t have enough time to contemplate completing a big project when my confidence of a high quality outcome is low (added to which there is always a long list of more mundane tasks that can quite easily expand to utilise all of my time and energy). I figured that if I could somehow ignore, or forget, the bigger, longer-term goal of the project and instead identify just one small self-contained piece, then that piece might get done. Importantly, these small self-contained pieces couldn’t just be single tasks, they had to be small projects requiring quite a few steps and quite a bit of thought and, therefore, feeling like worthwhile projects in their own right. I have decided to name these ‘micro-projects’ and now I have a list of half a dozen or so of these (it’s not a complete list yet) which I actually feel confident about tackling and want to tackle because they seem worth doing in their own right and are not just incomplete attempts at the larger projects.
Interestingly, quite a few of this first set of micro-projects involve bringing together large amounts of data from separate data files into single coherent data files that can then be explored further – for example, I have three sets of meteorological data for Plymouth and a set of lightning data for the UK that each currently sit in multiple files in Excel or text format. I want to combine the separate files for each data set and make them properly MATLAB compatible. Only once I have done this can I think about the next micro-project in each case – the first steps in analysing the data to find something out. Other micro-projects I have defined include producing a single trial piece of video-based maths support using an iPad app called ‘ShowMe’ and a test version of the online encyclopaedia I mentioned a couple of days ago populated with a small number of sample entries.
Anyway, although there is nothing particularly novel about this approach but I do feel quite refreshed by the steps I have taken today and think it was time well spent. Watch out for future entries here to see how my entry to the land of micro-projects goes.
Tim O'Hare 