Sam Gentle.com

Pregaming

A year ago, I wrote Interstitials, describing the problem of having extra stuff you tack on before your work actually starts. You sit down to get something done, but first you put some music on, and then what music do you listen to? Each one of these interstitials adds an extra opportunity for distraction and, crucially, adds more difficulty to the task right at the start.

It's this last problem, the extra work at the start, that I've come to realise is the worst part. Any additional decision you have to make is an extra load you have to shift to get started. I wrote before about starting inertia, and more recently about rebreathing as a warmup technique; both of these are based on the idea that building momentum requires more work than keeping it. Every bit of initial difficulty hits your motivation at exactly the time you can least afford some to spare.

Okay, okay, so interstitials are bad, get rid of them. But the problem is that there are some that you can't get rid of. Before you start writing you need to decide what to write. Before you start programming you need to open your editor, web browser, docs etc. In some cases you might have to coordinate with someone first or check something before you begin. Each of these things, while they might be necessary, adds extra weight that makes getting started that much more difficult.

I've found this particularly difficult, because I like time tracking, and it genuinely does solve the problem I want it to solve, but I find myself resisting it. In its own way, even something as simple as starting a timer can take me out of the space I want to be in. After all, I'm starting a timer now, that means I'm committing myself to working on this thing. Is this definitely the right thing to be doing now? Should I check if there's anything else more important? It adds the cognitive load of deciding what to do at the same time as actually doing it.

However, while these interstitials can't be removed, there's nothing saying they have to happen at exactly the moment you start. Lately I've been trying something I think of as pregaming: trying to do any extra stuff ahead of time. So as far as deciding what to write, I spend time at the start of the week deciding what I'll write each day. Sometimes I even open up a text editor in advance and write the title, just so there is literally nothing between me and starting but the first keystroke.

And as far as time tracking? Well, you can't start tracking your time any time except for when you start, but if you broaden the question to mean knowing what you're doing at a given time during the day, it starts to look an awful lot like our friend the timetable.