Question Everything: Summer plans: Big projects and small habits

I've tried two alternative paradigms of productivity in the past year.

First I used the "drip" method, where I try to do a little each day on all of my goals. Most importantly, this helped me build habits. It reduced procrastination because I just told myself I only had to do a little bit. But as I discovered, "drip" creates too much anxiety, and costs mental energy and time for every switch to an unrelated task. Because it takes time to get fully adjusted to a new task, this meant my actual results output was often minimal unless it was a particularly good day.

Therefore, I adopted the "burst" method where I focus exclusively on one project for a half or full day. This is the only way I could've finished multiple major projects with tight deadlines. This change also coincided with getting a decent handle on applying the Pareto Principle, forcing myself to focus on the 20% of work that yields 80% of results. It is worth obsessing and enduring mental pain for that work. Everything else gets done in a rapid-fire batch, but poor quality is perfectly acceptable.

However, even the Pareto-Driven Burst is flawed. I definitely excelled at my 3 most important projects, and all the small tasks were completed efficiently. But I stopped developing productive habits, because they got mixed in with the small tasks. I started wasting time on the Internet again during my free time. I stopped writing in my journal, meditating, generating ideas, practicing gratitude, and eliminating negative thought patterns. Obviously I stopped writing on my blog. I stopped practicing good eye contact and thinking about how I interact with people. I had no time to examine my habits on a daily basis.

Bursts get results, but they are hard and can easily burn you out. That's where habits come in. They manage stress. Productive habits serve as a solid base from which you can launch your most-important projects. There's no way I could've managed the "burst" period without the thought patterns, personality changes, and habits that I developed during the "drip" period. I would've procrastinated and self-doubted at every turn.

So, it is time to combine drip and burst. Let's examine how we can add habit formation to my current method.

Burst-only (current method):

1. Pick a most important project, work on it. Another day I'll work on another project.

2. Put everything else in one pile. Once the pile is large enough, spend a half day doing it and get it out of the way.

I had a pretty full schedule before. But if I can isolate most-important projects and batched tasks to particular time slots, I will have more time. This will be accomplished by scheduling. This should be made easier this summer since I have fewer batched tasks like meetings and required seminars.

Burst/drip combo (new method):

1. Each week, schedule continuous lengthy work sessions on most important projects, >3x per week. Once scheduled, no last-minute interruptions will be allowed.

2. Assign time each day for habits (early morning, usually). Accomplish as many as possible, then be sure to do the rest later in the day.

3. Fit everything else into batches of 30+ minutes. This includes e-mail.