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Park on a downhill slope

Submitted by Merlin on April 27, 2005 - 1:10am.

43F Google Group [Park on a downhill slope]

Jeffrey Windsor shares a great tip for making it easy to start work in the morning—by always leaving off at a point where it will be easy, intuitive, and interesting to pick things back up. Instead of grinding away until you’re drained and out of enthusiasm, quit while you’re on a roll.

Parking on a downhill slope is actually a practice which takes place when I end work the day before. Each day, when I wrap up whatever I’m doing, I jot down (on paper when I remember, otherwise I do it mentally with lesser effect) exactly where I need to start. And that is usually a question I’m still pondering/researching…

At first, the practice was disconcerting. I’d have a question to answer and then walk away, and I really wanted to sit back down and wrestle with the issue. I wanted closure. However, having a rich issue upon which to start makes starting so much easier, the discipline came easy…

Parking on a downhill slope eases the transition into work because you’re not starting your session with a dreaded task, but an interesting one. It’s easy to start your work. You want to start. Yes, you will still have to grade those papers (I have 120 of them waiting for me right now), but they’re what I do later, after I’ve completed more interesting stuff.

Similarly, I’ve heard that Hemingway advised writers to “leave some water in the well” by stopping in the middle of a paragraph or sentence.

That advice isn’t just for writers and students, of course. It could go for virtually any kind of job, and certainly fits well with the Getting Things Done idea of the “next action.”

[Link encouragement via David McCormick]

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I do something like this...

Submitted by thomas (not verified) on May 8, 2005 - 8:59am.

I do something like this when studying, and call it “prestudy”. Usually it happens when I’m really not motivated to do any real thinking, and consists of:

  • the general tidying of the study area (I hate it when I want to study and I have to clean things up first),
  • the ensuring of necessary materials (ever go to study and waste 10 minutes looking for a highlighter?),
  • the making of an outline (copy the headings and subheadings straight from the textbook in pen, with space in between for pencil notes while reading), and/or
  • the “skimming” of material (fits into the PQ4R study method).

Then when you’re all ready to hit the books and thinking, no time is wasted. Try it sometime.