The greatest insight I had when it comes to time management came from a surprising source. I had played around a bit with Pomodoro for my typical intellectual t

The greatest insight I had when it comes to time management came from a surprising source. I had played around a bit with Pomodoro for my typical intellectual tasks (research, programming etc.) with no real success. Then on a summer weekend my sister asked me to help her renovate her apartment, specifically I was tasked with the removal of all the wallpapers. I said sure, give me the key and I'll get going over the weekend and actually dropped by Friday after work...by chance I had my Pomodoro timer in my work backpack. I looked around and came to the conclusion that I had absolutely no idea how long it would take me to tear everything down. So I guessed how much I could do in 25 minutes, set the timer (25 minutes) and went to work. I got less done than expected and I suppose you could say I started a Bayesian process of sorts updating my priors but most importantly I realized that knowing how much time something roughly takes is extremely valuable in scheduling work. I went on to calculate roughly how many tomatoes it would take to get each room done and since there wasn't much time left on the Friday figured I could get one of the tiny ones done. It worked, the estimation was fairly accurate and I actually caught myself trying to beat my estimates. On Saturday I had a great plan and a firm goal (get the living room and one extra room done). I eventually settled in on 2 tomatoes followed by a 15 minute break. Worked great. tl;dr: Ever since that I get more done whenever I know how long it'll roughly take. That means exploring is very valuable. For new tasks I estimate in tomatoes, draw a circle for each and get going. When it takes longer I add squares and once the task is done I update my mental image of how long it'll take in the future. Whenever I don't know how long something might take I tend to procrastinate a lot until I force myself to timebox it. I think most interesting tasks tend to fall in this category.