Productivity: the problem for me, summed up in two images.
I’m a sucker for gadgetry. There is not an area of my life that isn’t technology-enhanced in some way (Oi! stop that sniggering at the back…)
But seriously. If it’s shiny – no, scratch that, it doesn’t even have to be shiny – if it’s cool and useful in some way, I tend to want it. I’m not going to list everything as it would seem somewhat boastful and inappropriate in these times of economic woe, but I’m sure you get the picture. I always know what item of technological wizardry I’m going to buy next should some money come my way through the various side-projects I’m involved in.
The trouble is, of course, that gadgetry depreciates rapidly in value. Perhaps I should buy rare books. They don’t tend to go down in value. Anyway, all of this can have an impact on my productivity if I’m not careful. I have to set aside times to focus on the things like my Ed.D. and work for publishing companies that has to be done. I suppose as one of my official job titles is ‘E-Learning Staff Tutor’ I could claim it’s all just research for work… ๐
My second major barrier to productivity stems from my youth. I can remember beingย about 12 years of age and round at a friend-of-a-friend’s house. He had a computer (quite a novelty in those days) and had just purchased a game by the name of Championship Manager ’93. Oh. My. Goodness. How I loved that game. I bought it and every version of the game since then almost as soon as they came out. I didn’t do as well as I should have done in my GCSE‘s because of the legendary Championship Manager Italia. I played incarnations of the game less at uni, but with its successor, Football Manager has seen me succumb once again. I’m currently playing Football Manager 2009 with its great 3D match engine which looks great on my (shiny!) new Macbook Pro.
I go through phases with games such as this. The trouble is that they’ve recently released Football Manager Live, which is to the sporting genre what World of Warcraft is to the MMPORG. I just know for a fact that if I started playing that then even my semblance of a social life would disappear! ๐ฎ
What are YOUR barriers to productivity? Do you accept and work with them, or are you working to eliminate them?