Second Life and Time Management: 5 Tips

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You’ve got to work in a product upgrade, a medium blog entry, an event, an uploading session, and training for one of your employees. How in Philip Linden’s name are you supposed to get it all done with a constant bombardment of IMs, eye candy, restlessness and lag?

It can be done, with the right combination of patience, selective apathy, and prioritization.

Here’s how.

1. Just Say No. And If You Can’t, Turn Invisible and Unreachable.

You are not the only expert in your field in all of SL. You know that, but sometimes your customers don’t. They fawn. They grovel. They beg, plead, whine, threaten to stop buying from you.

If you’re a nice person who’s overwhelmed with support requests and IMs from people who are really just looking for someone to talk to, here are three steps you can follow, in ascending order of severity:

A. Ignore. If you absolutely need Busy Mode off (and really, it’s better that you have it on when you really need it), have a standard message you can copy and paste. Make it polite, but firm: “I really can’t talk right now. Leave me a notecard if you really are having problems and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible”, for example.

B. Disappear. Except for the fact that IMs still show up, begging you to open them, Busy Mode is a godsend for getting things done. But it won’t work if you cave every time the IM Received button pops up. Let several messages pile up. You won’t see that button flash or anything if you get several messages. It will wait patiently for you to finish the most important things you have.

C. Mute. Some people just don’t value your time so they try to walk all over it. These people can’t be turned away without a lot more time. So mute them, either temporarily or permanently, depending on how much time they cost you versus the money they pay you.

2. Minimize. Shut down your web browser. Stop reading email that keeps popping up. Turn off music. STOP LOOKING AT THOSE ATTENTION-GRABBING HEADLINES. They only want you to click something that pays them. The world won’t die if you want to cluster your tasks into blocks to cut out blocks of fluff time.

3. Organize. At the start of your SL session, organize a to-do notecard with what you need done, and erase each thing as it is accomplished. Keep the notecard in case you get an idea or someone asks you to do something. Jot down your idea or get their contact information, and then get back to work.

4. Prioritize. I learned in management class that the list of goals you set for yourself should never be exhaustive. Set a reasonable amount of things to do, and then of those, knock out the things you know you absolutely need to do first. If you have some stragglers left at the end of your work time, don’t worry about them. Notify customers and others if you have to, but set the final decision to focus on something else, even if it’s just getting something to eat. Work to live, and take breaks. You’ll be more productive with a chance to clear your head.

5. Outsource. Your goal in SL is to make your time worth more and more. Decisions you make should compound on one another to make you more and wider opportunities while allowing you a chance to make more money per average day. If you don’t have much money to pay someone, find a way to compensate them. Offer store space, or some business tools, or advertise for them. Make them happy to help you, but get the most important thing, extra time, out of the arrangement.

Second Life, because it is a dynamic environment, can be massively distracting. Enter each SL session with a plan, turn off the shiny things that grab your attention, and what’s left should be productive time. This blog entry took me 24 minutes to write. Before, when I used to check my email while blogging, I’d curse myself trying to get to bed while looking at all the emails on my ad-supported ISP. No more. Just be focused, turn off the known distractions, and your lost productivity will be waiting for you.