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Why time management is ruining our lives
- codeulike 10y agoThis is a much more intelligent essay than you might expect based on the title. The stuff about Inbox Zero and it's author is very interesting.
- skinnymuch 10y agoYeah for sure. And yes Merlin Mann (Inbox Zero guy) is an awesome person. Very authentic and real. Didn't keep peddling productivity BS. I've followed him ever since.
- ZeroFries 10y agoLifestyle design and time management tend to make people less happy because they then tend to focus on the past and future, priming the desire/fear based systems which make you feel like the present moment is not good enough. The key to improving happiness is learning to guide the attentional system to the present moment as much as possible. The present moment is full of rich sensory data, usually inherently pleasant.
- colund 10y agoI manage my time by stopping reading after a few sections when I realize that the article does not contain information that will matter to me for real. It's actually quite simple. Only do things you really want to do and try to do it well. Be nice to others and be nice to yourself. Don't waste time reading stuff which is boring but... "stay hungry... stay foolish"
- skinnymuch 10y agoYeah I also felt that way after a couple paragraphs. I still skimmed/speed read to the end, but I get what you're saying. The article is good though and worth a full skim or speed read in my opinion
- nether 10y agoWhy should one stay hungry? What about conquering one's insatiability, and becoming content?
- golergka 10y agoThen you lose your drive to move forward. Then zen feeling of being content is not mush different from being dead.
- hornbaker 10y agoHappiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want.
- obstacle1 10y agoDelusion is asserting that you've found some objective measure of happiness that can be generalized to everyone.
- zpr 10y agoA pronounced theme in the article was disregarding this superficial drive to nowhere and instead focusing on philosophising on your own existence. I doubt many of us know what it's like to be dead but to think its Zen is actually a nice thought.
- enraged_camel 10y agoFalse dichotomy. Contentedness and happiness are very different things. The former comes from the inside. It is a sense of satisfaction and peace. The latter comes from the outside. It's a sense of elation and joy. The reason your post presents a false dichotomy is that it is possible to be both content and happy. In fact, people should strive for a balance of both. Being content should not get in the way of attaining happiness, or vice versa.
- PeterisP 10y agoWell, being content and happy with your current state is pretty much not compatible with high ambition and continually striving to achieve more, it's a tradeoff. As in the old quote - "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- andyidsinga 10y ago> Be nice to others and be nice to yourself. > Don't waste time reading stuff which is boring but... "stay hungry... stay foolish" this!
- paulpauper 10y agoironically reading such a long article seemed like a poor use of my own time , so I skimmed it
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- foldr 10y ago>Only do things you really want to do We all have ethical responsibilities that require doing things that we don't want to do.
- ryandrake 10y agoHaha, I notice that too. 5000+ word article on managing one's time.
- edem 10y agoCan someone summarize the point of the article who have read it?
- helloworld 10y agoTime management is difficult because work generally expands to fill the available time (Parkinson's Law), and it depends on the inherent, insoluble complexity of working with other people. The author suggests that time-management schemes are a means of distracting ourselves from the briefness of our lives and the inevitability of death -- the central theme of Ernest Becker's 1973 book, "Denial of Death": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
- edem 10y agoThank you.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zpr 10y agoI highly recommend reading the entire article because it's a good read and can't be adequately summarized in this way but here it is anyway: So-called productivity techniques usually end up having the opposite effect, in either the short-term, long-term or both. An obvious example is making workers work more leads to tired and frustrated workers over the long term. Or giving tight deadlines to increase throughput: just results in anxiety and slower net progress. That's manual labor -- for anything else, the perils are even greater: "Because you don't get creativity for free". However, the problem is even more fundamental. This trendy and increased desire for "efficiency", backed by capitalism and basic human greed, has a lasting effect on the psyche of society and it's individuals. In 1930, Keynes predicted that within a century, we would be working 15 hour work weeks, due to increased efficiency. That's hardly the case today. I enjoyed the carpet example: we created a vacuum to be more productive with cleaning the carpets, which would theoretically result in less time spent cleaning. However, now that we have vacuums, carpets are expected to be spotless, so we spend more time cleaning them anyway, and finding new ways to clean them even further. "Work expands so as to fill the time available for it's completion" -- Parkinson's Law. Finally the overall message is that we should slow down and live for the sake of living. Don't walk to exercise and get healthy -- walk to walk. Don't "party for contracts, lunch for contacts". Do things for their own intrinsic value. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". These ideologies need to be implemented at the societal level as well as the personal level.
- Spooky23 10y agoTime management and efficiency is a trap for the striver. Work smarter, not harder has always been a fundamental truism. I've seen time and again people working like donkeys, and pitching whatever they do to exec management. Half the time they eyeroll when the pitch is over because some buzzword wasn't incanted or the speaker said something that sounded like a thing that went bad in the previous meeting. Personally, inbox zero is an impossibly. (I think I'm at 15k unready right now) I have a gatekeeper for strangers, read emails from about 20 people and read priorities. The rest either doesn't need my attention, or folks will figure it out, or it will get bumped in the priority list. As a result I'm sane and work 40-45 hours a week. One of my colleagues feels compelled to answer everything. He doesn't realize that he's just enabling dependency from others and is working 60 hours a week, every week.
- oblio 10y agoYou can have both. I have 0 unread emails cause the garbage goes to spam, the unimportant is marked as read and everything else is read every X hours. The difference is probably ignore vs mass mark as read. I find it useful cause I have a small diff for each check. Think of it as Continuous Integration for email :)
- Spooky23 10y agoI used to do something like that until I had to testify in a deposition about such things for a day or two. Never again. Now I ignore, delete after a set period of time and have a written procedure in my home directory.
- saycheese 10y agoTolstoy, 1885: - Most important time is now; - Most important people are the ones you're with; - Most important task is helping them. __ Lots of people focus way, way too much on a past the may have never been, or at the least, will never change - and a future that may never be, or will feel different when it finally arrives as reality.
- curun1r 10y agoTolstoy was hardly the first to say something like that. The Buddha said roughly the same thing ~24 centuries earlier. Sage advice no matter who it's from.
- saycheese 10y agoCurious, what specific source are you referencing? I've restated Tolstoy's words from his short story, "The Three Questions."
- curun1r 10y agoRight mindfulness is part of the noble eightfold path in Buddhism. A somewhat oversimplified view of that teaching is an extreme focus on the current moment or task.
- learc83 10y ago"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." - Matthew 6:34
- andyidsinga 10y ago> - Most important time is now; I've been thinking about this occasionally -- it never quite sat right with me. Then, recently on a podcast (I think it was Marc Maron, can't remember the guest) they were talking about this, but suggested instead of living in the now, one should ONLY live in both the past and the future -- "those who suffer from dementia and similar diseases live in-the-now and its terrible". In a certain sense the past and future are all we have to interact about as now can be pretty illusive. So, with that in mind, the question becomes how to make it constructive and interesting.
- andyidsinga 10y agoI suspect that the notion of managing one's inbox creates a sort of kruger-dunning effect with the inbox owner in terms of perceived productivity. I've given up active or structured management of my inbox : I read a few times during the work day, try to keep up, but don't get worried about missing 40% of things that come through. I'm at-ease with the notion that important communications have a way of finding me (email, slack, skype, sms, phone, twitter ...) On the flip side of the coin I have a fairly unstructured way of finding the weird and surprising and personal by management-by-walking-around, going to the occasional meetup, the dog park, hosting parties at my house, scanning HN comments and reddit.
- rdiddly 10y agoAh, so you're one of those folks who doesn't answer my emails! Makes me pester you multiple times, by email, SMS, Skype, and if I'm truly desperate, the dog park. You're just outsourcing the work of communication onto me. When you ask for a favor I will pretend I didn't hear it! Winky emoticon.
- moxious 10y agoAre you sure all of your communications are so critical? There are also people who will chase others to the dog park to tell them that a CI build passed...
- bosie 10y agoi don't follow how you got to the snarky "critical" if andyidsinga is ignoring 40% of emails?
- Terretta 10y agoAs long as they ignore the right 40%.
- PeterisP 10y agoWell, because it would be reasonable to assume that 40% of a typical business user received emails are something that should be ignored. e.g. 10% of all emails are critical, important or urgent, 30% of emails aren't critical but need a response, additional 20% don't need a response but must be understood, and 40% are just "organizational noise".
- rauljara 10y agoMy favorite quote from the article: > One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough.
- Negitivefrags 10y agoI see this attitude fairly pervasively in hacker news when it comes to consuming media. When famous tech people like Bill Gates post lists of books, there is almost never any fiction on there. It's like reading is frowned upon as a waste of time unless it's non-fiction. You can get away with literary fiction but only if it's high-brow enough that it still feels like learning. Can I not just read a fantasy book because I find it entertaining?
- amazing_jose 10y agoI read somewhere that Bill Gates' wife forced him to read at least one general magazine every month because he was completely disconnected from reality. He only consumed financial books and magazines and never watched the news. He used to find famous people in parties and events and never recognise them or know why they were famous.
- SBCRec 10y agoOf course you can. It is your time to spend, not Bill Gates or any one elses. I don't read fiction although I enjoy reading history books even though some of them could be considered fiction by critics.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoAny tldr offering?
- maxxxxx 10y agoTime management is another way how the managing class dominates life more and more. For somebody who mainly spends his time in meetings it's fine to manage his time closely. For a lot of engineers it would be better if they solved only a few very difficult problems instead of many trivial ones as it seems to be the trend right now.
- rdiddly 10y agoMy first time hearing about Inbox Zero (a.k.a. how I've done email for 25 years) and I'm pissed I wasn't the one to make a bunch of money selling it to noobs suffering from email misuse!
- tunesmith 10y agoSlack (the concept, not the app) is interesting because it can also be applied personally. Lots of businesses these days talk about wanting to have both "high autonomy and high alignment" for their teams. So it's useful to think about having high autonomy, high alignment, and slack - for one's own individual life.
- justifier 10y agoi actively develop time management techniques the best experience i've ever had was with meeting a reading deadline i needed to read through a final draft of a book i was writing with friends before the publication date i had read the book a thousand times but in pieces so it was important for me to read it through cover to cover before it was published i knew when the deadline was and was putting it off until three days before the day and i still had 130 pages to read and edit i decided to dedicate a day to finishing it 130 pages, 1 day.. i could easily pull off 10 pages per hour and effectively work from 9am, to 10pm 10 pages per hour seems silly but it really is a mechanism to subvert what i call my reward response put in the time to read 10 pages at the start of any hour and the rest of the hour is mine to do whatever i want to stretch, workout, run, eat, context switch, information dope sometimes those 10 pages would take 5 minutes, woot! 55 minutes to work on some other project sometimes i would be so distracted that those 10 pages could take 40 minutes, so i'd make myself some tea and stare out a window for 10 minutes before the next hour reading simplifies this model because you can quickly gauge how many hours you want to work, how much reading you have to do, and roughly how fast you can read it's a bit different for other endeavors for instance, 10 lines of code can take 2 seconds or 2 years so instead of hard hour breaks i'll work until i finish a definitive partition of a larger project and wherever i lie in the current hour chunk determines the length of the reward, to be limited by the start of the next hour same game different rules
- jlgaddis 10y agoWhy do you neglect the SHIFT and punctuation keys yet give the ENTER key so much attention?
- justifier 10y agotime management ;P
- justifier 10y agook, i'll give a explicit answer because i prefer to read this way i wish you wrote this way i think ideas are easier to absorb when separated and simplified in this manner why do i think it is easier to absorb this way? perhaps it is because i am a mathematician, perhaps it is because i am a poet, or perhaps it is because i am a programmer, or perhaps it is because i'm an engineer, or perhaps it is because i am a visual artist, or perhaps it is because i am a chemist, or perhaps it is because i am a physicist, or perhaps its because i like to express myself through everything i do
- riqwant 10y agoFor some people like those that suffer from ADHD, good time management is the only way to lead a productive life
- zpr 10y agoWhat's considered a productive life could be subjective. And why should that be the ultimate goal anyway?
- quickben 10y agoIt shouldn't. But choosing to subscribe to established concepts (money will make me happy, marrying rich will make me happy, etc), is the easiest way to deal with the question: "what makes me tick, and what makes me happy, and what should I do in this life"
- jimsojim 10y agoIn that context, it would be more about the number of tasks in your time table instead of how well managed the time is for each one of them (or overall). A schedule with a lot of tasks (context switching), will not serve ADHD person well.
- junto 10y agoOne of my bosses had a good way of dealing with emails. He would only write one single short replies. No "Dear/Hello Blah", no sign off, just one single terse sentence that was straight to the point. He detested my wordy, time laboured and well formatted emails that looked like letters. He had a point. He treated email like a messenger application, whereas many of us still see it as an electronic replacement for the physical letter. Once you see the difference the time savings are huge.
- ryandrake 10y agoThis style breaks down when you ask three distinct questions, and the boss (who's so busy he can't even form sentences) simply responds "YES". Now you're guessing. Yes to everything? Yes to only the last question? Now more E-mails are needed and nobody wants that.
- frahs 10y agoI think you're confusing being terse with being bad at communicating. Original comment isn't talking about giving useless answers, they are talking about removing flowery language from emails and keeping them as short as possible while still giving enough info.
- softawre 10y agoI also learned to be succinct early in my career, when I emailed a VP a wordy mess and he gave me this important advice. Every word you type costs the company money, compounded by how many people see the email. Make your words count.
- dennisgorelik 10y agoIn the situation with 3 questions he can answer: 1) Yes. 2) Yes. 3) No. Or he can answer: "Let's do XYZ." and ignore two other points. That would hint that one email should cover one topic to keep things simple.
- xamuel 10y agoEach minute writing deserves at least two minutes deleting.
- ryandrake 10y agoI've never actually achieved Zero Inbox, but I'm pretty close. One thing that helps is to create meaningful, actionable folders for your E-mails. I have these: Urgent: Follow-up today in person Follow-up today by E-mail Follow-up this week Waiting for non-urgent response Hound (for people who take constant babysitting, I'll send request daily until it's responded to) Watch (if thread is replied to, I'll need to be on it) Archive (all resolved items) Ignored (no interest to me and no response needed) I've got a few others but these are the ones I use the most. My workflow is to skim my new messages. Reply to the ones that can be quickly addressed, and file the rest into these folders to be reviewed at an appropriate time (generally by EOD). I try to address all questions to me by EOD before I let myself go home. Because I don't like That Guy Who Doesn't Respond To E-mails, I try to set a good example and not be that guy.
- BN1978 10y agoI like your system for emails. You inspired me to do add to my Trello list: "Try ryandrake system for my inbox."
- JW_00000 10y agoYou've just added an item to your to-do list to organize your to-do list. Isn't this the exact thing the article was criticising? > "This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!’"
- BN1978 10y agoThe article has a right to its opinion. I don't agree with all in the article. In the real life, most of the time, the truth isn't black or white. Is improving my organization/time-management system really kind of procrastination? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Again, it depends.
- Symbiote 10y ago
- coldcode 10y agoAt work it is routine for people to create long phone meetings, invite 50 people who all are expected to be online, talk for hour with no decision, plan another meeting for later to talk about it again. People only show up because if they don't they will be blamed for anything that goes wrong which will spawn more unpleasant meetings. The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two programmers, but the end result is massive wastage of time where no one can get any work done. Because no work is accomplished, more meetings must be held to decide what to do to fix it. Of course as a programmer I am expected to get everything done within a small window of time which of course doesn't include all the meetings, so I have to be masterful of what time I have to avoid being called into meetings about why I didn't get things done on time.
- duaneb 10y ago> The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two programmers In my experience, those two programmers rarely have a good enough understanding of existing codebase and momentum to make good decisions. Without meetings, there is little way to avoid these problems. Programmers are good at implementation, not (necessarily) decision making. Also, meetings only make sense if everyone is focused on decision making; this is a company culture issue more than anything.
- gedy 10y agoThose who can, do. Those who can't, talk.
- blowski 10y agoNice idea, but doesn't work in practice. Without talking regularly with key stakeholders, you have no idea whether you're building the right thing - and frequently you won't. If you define productivity merely as writing lines of code, then sure, meetings are a waste of time. But if you define productivity as delivering something genuinely valuable, then talking often makes you much more productive.
- 10y ago
- austinl 10y ago> “This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!’” Outside of email, I often get carried away with setting up a system for doing work instead of actually doing work. If I know I have a lot to do, I'll spend time thinking about how I might organize it in a list and track my progress. Sometimes I even open the App Store and look through more to-do apps! Something I've settled on now is making a list (usually in an app called Clear), then going through it once a day and putting it on my calendar. Putting things on my calendar has helped a lot. I think, "this is the time I've set aside to get this thing done. I'm not going to focus on anything else but this for the next 30min/1hr". It also makes me feel less guilty about relaxing when I've got nothing scheduled.
- llwt 10y agoThat sounds a lot like the Pomodoro Technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
- flor1s 10y agoI think the Pomodoro Technique is one of those things the article posted warns you against. Having a timer counting down might make you more stressed about time passing. When I was using the Pomodoro Technique many people who I met mentioned that effect to me as a reason why they did not use Pomodoro's.
- devonkim 10y agoI believe there exists an optimum methodology to optimize whatever the desired output KPIs are for a person at any given time and that what doesn't work for one is literally optimal for another person. Some people have achieved success with a methodology, some will fail miserably. Some people will do far better with a suboptimal method than many that find their optimum method as well. The question is about finding the solution as fast as possible for an individual and with the best accuracy. Personally, I think I need some sense of urgency to perform deliberate, spaced practice reliably due to a strong history of what may be something like ego depletion (not really well supported). Pomodoro has worked better for me than most methods as long as I have sufficiently well crafted goals because it forces breaks as well as time boxing for results when I have a tendency to overengineer (along the same lines as SMART requirements). Like exercise, if you feel really comfortable, there's a strong possibility that you are not making the desired progress. In such cases, those that are motivated positively by the stressors are predisposed to improve over those that do not get motivated in such a manner even if that would be the most optimal technique globally.
- BN1978 10y agoI don't want to be a slave to my to-do list (my way of dealing with time-management). OTOH, if I don't have a to-do list, in the long run, I am also not happy, and that negatively influence the quality of my life. I try to find a balance between the two. Sometimes I am successful in that, and sometimes I am not. And BTW, I am great Trello fan.
- tedmiston 10y agoAs I read this well written piece I can't help but to stop and think about the irony of reading a 22-minute article about priorities and time management instead of getting back to spending time with family and friends over the Christmas break. I will stop and react to one piece: > In an era of insecure employment, we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing This is why I started my own company this year. I still do the same type of work providing dev services vs being a dev employee, but it's freed me from busy work that involves being present in a chair 9–5 which gets mistaken for productivity in a traditional office environment.
- iagooar 10y agoMay I ask you how you did the jump to self-employment? Did you build up your network while working for a salary and then switch to your own company? I know I'd love to be my own boss, but it seems tough to find enough clients in order to pay yourself a salary.
- tedmiston 10y agoPretty much what you said. For client sourcing I just asked a few founder friends if they would be interested in contracting a part time dev and they were. That was unituitively one of the easiest parts. Also, the market rate as a contractor is quite a bit higher than as an employee which helps cover some of the time that isn't billable.
- ikeyany 10y ago> I just asked a few founder friends Ah. It all seems so simple when phrased like that. To be an insider...
- tedmiston 10y agoI wouldn't necessarily say that. I live in a third- / fourth-tier startup ecosystem and started here from scratch about 3 years ago. Taking a job for a company still working in the space provided by the accelerator (which happens to host lots of meetups) was one of the best things to happen to me though, even if that company ultimately failed. (I got that first job blindly off AngelList with no connections.)
- ilaksh 10y agoMy solutions: be unpopular, avoid adding appointments, avoid starting new projects, don't create to-do lists. Instead of long to-do lists I just focus on prioritizing realistically and try to take care of the next few really important things in a thorough way. And I try to make sure feedback loops are relatively tight so I can keep reprioritizing correctly. The lack of popularity is partly on purpose and partly just works out that way for some reason. Another thing I do is I avoid scheduling appointments or starting new projects. So the vast majority of my emails are spam that I can ignore. Obviously many people's lives will make these strategies difficult to implement.
- nowaq 10y agoI love your strategy. I employ similar one whenever I can. "Remove myself from the equation" is a good mantra to go by. I'd add that priorities are key to being productive but not overwhelmed.
- tptacek 10y agoWeird tangent: A couple years ago I had a wicked bout of insomnia, and one of the things I did to combat it was to scrub all my screens of clocks, so that I couldn't easily succumb to an anxious urge to check the time when I was having trouble falling asleep. I've found that not having a clock in the upper-right corner of my screen slightly but noticeably chills me out. Like the little red badge on the email client telling you to stop what you're doing and check your mail, the clock is a source of tiny little distractions throughout the day. I still use calendars, of course, and I'm never more than a couple keystrokes from the time.
- ahh 10y agoIs there an easy way to remove a clock from Android? How about OSX?
- ParadoxOryx 10y agoOn macOS, you can hold the command key and drag the clock off the menu bar.
- newscracker 10y agoIn OS X, you can go to Apple menu->System Preferences->Date & Time->Clock and uncheck "Show date and time in menu bar". To bring it back, just check that option. [System Preferences has a lot to offer for many things, including custom keyboard shortcuts and such]
- elihu 10y agoA good book about time management is Momo, by Michael Ende. It's a children's novel about a time-saving bank that comes to town and provide a service whereby any time their customers save can be deposited in an account to be paid back later with interest. The townspeople become more hurried and efficient and remove the things from their lives that give them meaning, and pretty soon everyone is rushing around and miserable, because they don't have any time for anything. The bank of course is a ponzi scheme. (reposted from my reddit comment a few days ago on the same article) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel)
- chakalakasp 10y agoA German friend gave me this book almost 20 years ago; it's a children's book, but it's quite profound in spots. It's a bit dark, too. Same author as The Neverending Story. Who knew that Children's Dystopia Fiction could be a thing and that it could be good.
- PhilipRawson 10y agoThis was made into a German film released in 1986 — you can watch it on YouTube with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_JYYcBP2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_JYYcBP2Q
- elihu 10y agoCool, I knew there was a movie but I didn't know there was an English version available. (Note: the link you give is dubbed. Is there a subtitled version on YouTube as well?)
- elihu 10y agoOh good, they included Beppo the roadsweeper's monologue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_JYYcBP2Q#t=15m05s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_JYYcBP2Q#t=15m05s This was something that's stuck with me ever since I read that book. Very good advice on how to get stuff done without burning yourself out.
- morganic 10y ago
- serb348 10y ago"A Short Cartoon about Time" by david firth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idCFV0KF4uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idCFV0KF4uo
- anigbrowl 10y agoOn a similar note, efficiency is good but if you run a perfectly efficient operation then you're extremely vulnerable to disruptions. If all you care about is beating other competitors so as to be #1, then of course you want to be as efficient as possible, just as a professional athlete orients everything around the exercise and practice required to excel in competition. That's great, but it also has pitfalls - specialization can result in inflexibility in changing circumstances, and if you operate close to the envelope of capability all the time then a small mistake can have drastic consequences.
- chiefalchemist 10y agoBeing efficient is not the same as being effective. Focusing on scheduling for the sake of filling time is a fool's errand. Furthermore more, in a given day or series of days, the brain has limits. It can and does run out of gas. Those times you think "I can't think anymore" are legit and true. In terms of true productivity "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock is by far the best thing I've read. Highly recommended if you want to think better.
- albertTJames 10y agoI am happily surprised that this kind of anti-capitalistic bit got to the top of HN. Usually, any sort of critic of the current financial system gets hacked down. Hope still for a better future then.
- torpfactory 10y agoSome thoughts on time management: - Understanding that you will probably not accomplish everything on your to-do list was an important insight that I discovered a few years into my career. Some things will fall off the list, and that's OK. It's best to make explicit decisions in this regard: I will NOT work on that task / project because it just doesn't have the priority. You may be asked for this sort of reasoning later. - The company always wins. If you're a salaried employee, the company will almost always demand more time than you want to provide. If you're lucky, they will be flexible, but don't expect them to value your time in any meaningful sense. Protect it for yourself in the most graceful and diplomatic way possible. - If you are an individual contributor on a tech / engineering team: Keep in mind that you are only partially credited for being responsive to email and other requests. Your technical and intellectual contributions are often far more important than keeping your inbox at "zero". - The best manager I knew had a very light touch with time management. He didn't keep his inbox at zero, he often said no to requests, and he didn't employ any real time management framework at all. He always kept in the forefront of his mind whatever the most important task were for the business. If his team were barraged with corporate bureaucratic junk (useless training classes, etc), he would stand in front of management and say "no, fuck that, that's useless". He was quite successful and could "get away" with this behavior, though I suspect it was this very behavior which had something to do with his success.
- grecy 10y ago> If you're a salaried employee, the company will almost always demand more time than you want to provide.... Don't expect them to value your time in any meaningful sense. Protect it for yourself in the most graceful and diplomatic way possible. This is so extremely important, right from the get go. If, in your first months of employment you work 60 hour weeks, you have set the expectation that will continue. If, on the other hand, you push back to what is reasonable, that's the expectation that has been set, and will continue into the future.
- gordaco 10y agoI once pushed so that I could have a reasonable schedule, and I got fired pretty quickly. They literally told me that I was good at my tasks, but I wasn't putting enough time. As far as I know, their schedules were basically illegal in my country (not the USoA), although theoretically my firing was legal (they just ended my probation period). It was not a good place to work. The money was fine, but time trumps money unless in case of extreme need. I eventually found a workplace with sane schedules where I am both happy and productive.
- nunez 10y agoFunny thing about this. I spent what probably amounted of hours of time looking for the perfect email client for my Surface, namely, one that would let me snooze my email without requiring Inbox. I also embarked on the same journey for my iPhone. I eventually got tired of switching from client to client and went with mobile Gmail on Safari. It's much less distracting. You eventually realize that if people REALLY need you, they'll call you!
- WWKong 10y agoI would like to share this method that I'm experimenting with and have found good success with. Last week of each quarter quantify your last quarter and write-up your OKRs for next quarter. Delete everything in your to-do list and clear out your inbox. Start from zero. It helps to think about it like you are quitting your job and starting a new one. I call it Q-boot.
- inovica 10y agoYou're quite low down in the comments list, but I actually like this and do something similar. I actually put all my files somewhere else - just in case I need them I can find them in a search. I then focus
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- tomphoolery 10y agoGTD and Inbox Zero never felt like "time management" strategies to me, they're more like methodologies for very specific use cases like your email and to-do list. While they do help you manage the email flow coming in and what you have to do in your life that might slip by, they don't really teach you how to manage the rest of the time that it takes to actually do stuff in your life. My time management is basically a combination of Inbox Zero, GTD, and "extreme calendaring". Every (working) morning, I spend about a half hour processing my email and either replying to/reading messages or delegating replies/reads for the future. I delegate reading email by moving the messages into a folder called "Deferred", which I will go through at the end of the day to read anything that I might not have wanted to get into in the morning due to lack of time. To delegate writing replies, I will typically archive the message and start a reply to it in Drafts. I might also remind myself to reply to the email at a specific time or when I get home. My "inbox" for GTD is the Reminders list on my iPhone. Using Siri, I typically tell my phone to remind me to do things at various times or when I arrive at home/work/the grocery store/etc. Every Sunday, I block out about two hours to go through this list and do any tasks that aren't scheduled for a certain time. Reminders that have a schedule are expected to be done at that time, and reminders set for me to do when I arrive somewhere should be done pretty much immediately upon arrival. But the real trick to time management is using the Calendar. I block off time during the day to do certain things, and by default, I get notified when I have to do them. I've conditioned myself to just start working on whatever my calendar tells me to do when I get an event notification, and I attempt to put in things like travel times and longer/multiple alerts to remind me to get ready for longer events or for traveling to events. I'm a programmer in my day job and a musician at night, so I'm already used to being responsive to my calendar, but the music business doesn't really work like that. I have to put in all my appointments, like mixdowns, rehearsals, gigs, meetings, etc., in my own calendar if I want to make it to everything on time and not look like a space cadet. So while GTD and Inbox Zero help my calendaring be more efficient, the real secret sauce to me keeping my life together is my calendar.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI have heard vintners say "water the vine, ruin the wine." The theory as explained to me was that if the plants have enough water they make uniform grapes and that makes for a very dull wine. But let them struggle and the complexity multiplies making for a very good wine. Scott McNealy at Sun felt that way about engineering. Engineering was always asked to do more than it could with insufficient time or budget. The effect of that was a natural prioritizing of what did get budget or time and a lot of creativity in how the goals might be met. I realized in my own life that if I don't put a deadline on something, even an artificial one, things can get stuck. And sit there stuck forever. The deadline forces me to go back and try a different solution to get it across the finish line. Yes it is a "lame mental trick" but one that for me is effective.
- 0xCMP 10y agoI find that current time management tools worry about the wrong thing. HN talks a lot about UX and the psychology of the things we use. For example, how sticky Facebook or YouTube can be. I think that time management has in someways had very good ideas, but the tools needed have never existed. Waiting for the tools has been futile. (i.e A todo list with swipe-actions doesn't help you get more stuff done. Switching to all paper can be impractical. Using OrgMode doesn't work well on mobile cause the app isn't super maintained anymore. etc.) I have always liked the system of keeping a calendar, a list of things todo, and making a habit of deciding which of those things to do today. If I have free time when I should be working I look at the list otherwise: whatever. In more detail it's a mix of Cal Newport's ideas with some of Zen To Done. I am working on something that I think will help with this software problem. Eventually I'll show it on HN. I think many people on here are going to enjoy it a lot even in the early form I will first release it in.* * And even if they didn't. It's what I wanted anyways so I still win!
- fsloth 10y agoThe book "Algorithms to live by" by Brian Christian pointed out that as a society, we've switched in interpersonal communication from 'circuit switching' to 'packet switching'. I.e nowadays anyone can send anything, and it's the recipients responsibility to deal with all the messages coming in. Earlier, e.g. with phone, fax and paper mail, the communication bandwidth for incoming noise - err, I mean messages - was lower, and the individual did not need to deal with so much traffic.
- EGreg 10y agoInduced demand from organizations. Organizations are not people. That's why we work harder despite being more efficient.
- coliveira 10y agoTo-do lists don't work because they're themselves bureaucratic work that gets in the way to real work. After I cut to-do lists from my life I have a much better time doing real work. Of course I keep notes, but they are not things "to do", they're just information that I may, eventually, need for the really important things I do.
- caseysoftware 10y agoI got into some habits a few years ago that I'll share here: - First, I "write" everything down. Every task goes on my Trello board. (one personal, one for work) - The first columns of my boards are always: In Progress, Next, and Done. Those are the most important ones. I have other ones for Considering, Learn More About, and usually project specific. - There is never more than one thing on my In Progress board. Sometimes I have to move another task into it but then the other thing has to move out, usually to Next. - When I finish something, it goes into the Done column and another task (usually from Next) moves into In Progress. - Each Monday morning, I review my Done board from the last week. If it's really done, I archive all the cards and start fresh. Sometimes tasks move back into In Progress or Next. - I don't set due dates just to have a deadline. Either there's a deadline or there's not.. less self-imposed stressed. - Recurring meetings and tasks never continue past December 31st. After that, I re-evaluate and recreate the necessary ones. - Around Dec 31st, I go through my notes on projects and ideas. If it's still valuable, I keep it. If not or if I'm not going to work on it, I archive them. Less self-imposed stress.
- nowaq 10y agoLet's call it #productivityhoax! Great article. I always felt those productivity systems are missing the point. The key thing to understand is that there's literally INFINITE number of things we could be doing. They all compete for our very limited time. There's only one way to stay sane and productive and it's having explicit PRIORITIES. That's your shield from the demands of the world. That's where you decide where you want to go. (I've written a post about it http://frustrat.com/on-priorities-and-focus/ http://frustrat.com/on-priorities-and-focus/) Second - no list is a time-management tool. They're just lists. If you want to get a hold of the time you need to use a CALENDAR. That's where you "budget" or allocate the time to do things. The beauty of this is that it shows you when you bankrupt on time. Ie. when there's too much on your todo list and you need to remove some of it. The list will not help you do that. Other benefits of this approach: low stress, low context-switching, feeling of control, effectiveness (as opposed to efficiency). It's like DHH says in the tweet: "Secret to productivity is not finding more time to do more stuff, but finding the strength to do less of the stuff that doesn't need doing." Also Rory Vaden is onto something in his "multiply your time" approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2X7c9TUQJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2X7c9TUQJ8 Another proof of the #productivityhoax is that we all have the same 24h, yet our outcomes are so different. Time is the biggest equaliser. Think about it :)