I have been experiencing some knee problems lately, so I got myself some exercises to work out the affected area on my own (I try to avoid doctors as much as I can because there is usually not much humanity left in them, so they don’t care if they heal or kill. And btw, this is an example of purposeful exercise, nothing to do with my previous ramblings about running here).
I have been doing them for some time and my knees seem to be happy about it. In fact this is something that I had been procrastinating for a long time, because I am not inclined to physical exercise (which is easy to see in the quality of my writing 
).
The fact is that those exercises, at the beginning, seemed endless. What a boring thing to do! Besides, they made me feel a bit like Ethan Hawke’s character in Gattaca: having to deal with half thousand prosthesis every morning before the “real” day starts…
But you know: everything gets better with time, practice takes you to Carnaby Hall, etc, and now my exercises have become something more automatic. There are several causes for that, but the most remarkable of them has been the reduction of what we could call “latency times”. I youtubed my exercises and wrote them down in a paper, so at first I had to consult my paper exercise after exercise to see what was next.
The bore, the fatigue, was not from the exercises themselves. My body thanked the exercise. The problem were interruptions, the continuous switching between two different mental sets. While doing the exercises I was in “the zone”. The worse moment was the confusion in the in-betweens. Having to figure out what came next caused a state close to anxiety.
I have a certain tendency to overplaning, and, like I said, physical exercise is not something that comes natural to me, so I simply dived into the exercises once I decided I was going to do that. But this time maybe I was too frugal. Having to figure out which exercise comes next (because they were not arranged), going back to the other room, where I had left the stopwatch that I needed for the next set of exercises… all that kind of things did not allow the prose of my locomotive system flow at ease.
Now I’m done with that. My muscular memory takes care of almost everything; each exercise is arranged to be located close to its most similar partner, I even get to read a few pages of a book in the easy lifting exercises.
I had tried to suppress interruptions in other occasions, in relation to other tasks. But only now, maybe because the task at hand was unpleasant to me, I have reached maximum efficiency and fully realized the importance of those “floating spaces” in our lives.
Now I wonder in how many areas we’ll be suffering that kind of stress, not because of the tasks, but because of the continuous “mounting and dismounting the horse”. Funny how we are made: switching activity, mental set, always implies an energy cost. But, on the other hand, maintaining the same activity for a very long period causes monotony, which also diminishes energy and attention. In a way, productivity can be regarded as how one deals with the proportion of both factors, a proportion that is maybe different for each one of us.
Have you found other task batching of which you are proud of? Any trick for annoying tasks? Creative timeboxing? Come on you tweakers!
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