Time and Task Management
As broad overview on how I think about time management is that each of us works very differently and each of us has to leverage our abilities in different ways. I feel that the brain is for HAVING ideas, not STORING ideas. As such a lot of the tools focus on this.
There are two parts to getting things done:
- Figuring yourself out
- Using tools to augment your abilities
Figuring Yourself Out
Sleep and Daily Rhythms
The human body and mind are loosely consistent, with clear rhythms that can be observed and changed. Usually when these cycles are graphed they look like poorly drawn sine waves. Metabolism, sleep, cognition, and other physiological processes follow a circadian rhythm: figure out your rhythms:
- At what time do you feel the happiest and most energized waking up? Are you staying up late because you want to or are you avoiding something by tiring yourself out?
- There is no such thing as genetic night owls or morning larks, however it is very hard to change sleep schedules abruptly.
- When food is available at the wrong time, our system will be affected. You feel hungry around the same time every morning regardless of what you ate for dinner the night before because our brain clock or the clock in the hunger center tells us when we should be hungry. At the same time, the brain and gut talk to each other, and the clock in the gut tells the brain to get ready for a rush of breakfast.
- Coffee is bad for your circadian rhythm. And it affects digestion of glucose.
- Fasting can help disrupt cycles and make it easier to become more aware of previous cycles and create new ones.
- The brain also goes through many cycles, allowing yourself to switch between focused thinking (the so-called laborer mind) and diffuse mode thinking (the inspiration fairy, creative side, or the background processor) will lead to a much more natural and happier daily schedule.
âA rose is not necessarily and unqualifiedly a rose; that is to say, it is a very different biochemical system at noon and at midnight.â
Waking up to alarm clocks by nature means depraving naturally needed sleep. Transitioning from alarms to no alarms might lead to a period of adjustment, where the body will want to âcatch upâ on sleep and thus sleep longer than what will eventually become the natural rhythm.
Consistency helps for most people, most bodies benefit from a fairly rigid sleep schedule.
Listening to the body like with diets and exercise also applies to sleep, if the body does not want to sleep it will be harder: might be easier and better to just get less sleep on one day but sleep more the next. Amount of sleep varies, average falls around 7-9 hours, edge cases might be as little as 4 to as much as 12. Winter months and darkness leads to longer sleep, too much light leads to less sleep.
A couple degrees colder temperature than you are used to when awake can improve sleep.
For best sleep there is a suggestion about the so called 3-2-1 rule:
- No food 3 hours before bed.
- No liquid 2 hours before bed.
- No screen 1 hour before bed.
Sources:
- Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker
- No more alarm clocks
- Rhythms of Life by Russell Foster
- The circadian code by Satchin Panda
- The Labor of Inspiration
- Learn How To Learn
Chaos or Order
To do things now or later? Most people are usually told repeatedly that they should complete their things earlier rather than later. As a rule this works, but I know many a people who exceed in meeting deadlines late. Doing things last minute can be an advantage if you let yourself do things this way and donât beat yourself up for not doing it early.
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Negative emotions are a compass
I donât know why people romanticise jealousy as protectiveness, anger as passion, greed as ambition, but you donât need to learn these emotions. And if you have learned them, you certainly donât need to practice them. In fact, do the opposite. Save your energy by focusing on the positives and strengths, thereâs a lot to be happy about in our life, weâre extremely fortunate!
Negative emotions are a signal deep from within, they give clues about your roots, the unconscious, traumas: in general negative emotions tell us when something needs changing.
So do not resist negative emotions, to do that is to resist the flow of life. Listen to the signals and find your place in life. Life is like a river we canât get out of. You either go with the flow, use the flow, and swim in the flow or you stay in place, frustrated, and eventually tire and break.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess
During our daily tasks, when we are tackling something unknown top down thinking can speed up our ability to deliver results. However if you feel that your guesses hit dead end again and again then put a stop to it and switch to a bottom up methodology and refuse the temptation to guess again.
People take into consideration body language, tone, vocal hesitations, and extrapolate enormous amounts of information when talking. At the first hint of confusion or misunderstanding, say âIâm sorry, I donât understandâ. If they continue to give you incomplete confusing information, you are going to say again, patiently, âI donât understandâ, donât worry they wonât mind repeating themselves, they all love talking, itâll help them too, trust me. And if on the third utterance they still donât make sense, you say âIâm sorry, I donât think YOU understandâ. Because half the time they DONâT, and itâs not your responsibility to teach them how to communicate.
Eat the frog
To eat the frog means to do the least pleasant or hardest task first. Donât let it loom over you while you do other easy things on your task list like laundry or shopping.
Do the hardest thing first and feel as the weight rolls off your feathers.
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Build habits, then chain them together
Pay attention to what is making you do thing, its trigger, like a location, a song, a person or a thought. Then build a feedback loop to improve and chain these triggers together.
Tiny daily change adds up cumulatively over time. You wonât see it at first.
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Imitate, imitate, imitate
Pay attention to how people act, do what they do, then adapt things to fit to you.
This works as well in a sprint planning meeting as it does on the dance floor.
Just do a bit
Cumulative change adds up. Doing little makes things seems manageable and easier.
Focus on action, not outcome. Creating goals creates assumption which are essentially false realities, they may or may not align with the real flow of life. Focusing on action opens one up to the flow and its multiple possible outcomes and complexities.
Free yourself from assumptions that a gym session is supposed to always be a hour long or that if you start cleaning you should clean the whole. If you feel like exercising for 20 minutes or only dusting one cabinet then leave it at that.
You are not supposed to empty all your lists and get all of your ideas done at once. In fact thatâs impossible, try it. Instead treat it as a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably donât feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library â and not because there arenât an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
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Do LESS
There is an infinite amount of things to experience, do and create. You will be inclined to say yes to everything every time. Take a look at your calendar: what if you get sick? And yes, it allows you to double-triple-quadruple book events, but should you? Give slack.
Find your limits, then commit to half of them: the âfreeâ half will be filled by life itself anyway.
In general people can focus on 2, maximum 3 major things they can successfully focus on besides the daily up-keep and administration (keep yourself and your home clean, cooking etc). Find your 2-3 things and start saying ânoâ, strip everything else.
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Humanize, Organize, Mechanize
Humanise
Do everything manually, on paper if needed, for many iterations.
Organise
Notice the patterns that are creeping into your methods.
Mechanise
Automate those patterns in a system, either by writing checklists, flowcharts or software.
Get Medicated
If it seems that no matter what you do, you can not focus and no system provides any way to alleviate it, consider getting diagnosed. Many go years only to jump in surprise after getting on medication (i.e. with ADHD) and wonder in hindsight âhow the hell did I manage all these years? Is this what it feels like to have a quiet brain?â
Accept Your Limits
Life deals your cards just once, you only decide how to play them. There just are limits to our abilities that have no known ways to transcend them. The better you understand your limits the less you will spend on clean up after your body forces you to take breaks (burnouts, lack of sleep etc).
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Look Out For Burnouts
Burnouts donât happen because you are doing too much, instead it is about excessive effort with minimal benefit so the brain starts doing the effort calculus and finds the outcomes not worthwhile.
When you work your ass off only to have your boss dismiss will lead to burnout. A leader recognizing your hard work and value will do the opposite. The only difference between these situations is the outcome of the value we tried to create not the amount of effort.
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Using Tools to Augment Your Abilities
In my mind the brain is for HAVING ideas, not STORING ideas. Maybe its a self fulfilling that I consider memory to be unreliable, but I decided to declare bankruptcy on my memory and figure out a task management system that allows me to keep my mind as empty as possible. The less I think about what to do and when to do it, the more I have time to focus on what matters to me. As examples David Allenâs GTD, Trello, Zettelkasten, notebook task systems, calendars are all popular parts of successful systems.
Whatever system piques your interest, there is one general tip: make sure to make it possible filter tasks by what you can and canât do at a moment: task systems that donât do this filtering create more undue distractions. Calendars are good at this by design in such a way that you probably didnât even notice it.
In the end these systems come in many different forms and it is up to each of us to discover and build the one that works for our brain alone. The common core of the systems is usually following:
- Calendar
- What to do and when to do
- Loose notes
- Store ideas quickly
- Organized notes
- Make your ideas and knowledge actionable and useful
Calendars
Calendars are the main tool that allows one to tune the amount of order in their lives.
Calendars, in general, work a lot better than lists as they allow you to offload thinking about when to do things. The mind hates unfinished things and will keep dwelling on them doubly so if it doesnât know for a fact that there isnât a specific time allocated to getting it done. For critical things and short term to do lists, try to prefer calendar. For long term and optional things, to do lists work well.
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Note Systems
Once you establish a healthy sleep routine and clear your mind of the burden of remembering lists and schedules, youâll likely find yourself generating more ideas. So, what do you do with them? I find it helpful to categorize them into two main groups: loose and organized notes.
Loose notes are for capturing spontaneous thoughts, ideas, and other knowledge throughout the day. They serve as a repository without any barriers - simply jot down whatever comes to mind without worrying about organization or categorization. The goal is to capture ideas effortlessly, allowing you to revisit them later if need be.
Once youâve take the time to develop a loose note further, you can refine it and transform it into an organized note, making it more useful and actionable. Opposed to loose notes, with organized notes you should think less about content and a lot more about how to make information comprehensible, searchable and well categorized.
There are countless note-taking systems available, but broadly speaking, consider whether you prefer physical or digital notes. If you opt for digital, I suggest using a plain text format to ensure compatibility with various systems in the future (Markdown based systems are great).
Bringing Notes and Calendars Together By Example
Letâs walk through an example of my daily life, navigating my systems.
I check my calendar and see that I have a day with no hard commitments, prompting me to designate it as a workday. I get to work and open my personal Trello board where I have two lists:
- Active
- Backlog
Trello serves as a complement to my calendar. While calendars excel in delineating specific timeframes for tasks, they falter when it comes to handling unstructured time allocations, such as my workday. Thus, Trello accommodates tasks without predefined time slots, allowing me to categorize them under specific activities. This setup enables me to view scheduled activities on my calendar while referencing associated tasks on Trello.
So, I take 1 or 2 things (if I can do them in parallel) from the Backlog and drop them in to the Active list. During the time at work I will work on the Active tasks, adding notes to the item as I go along and then archive the item once the task is finished.
Then, over coffee we talk about a movie a colleague saw and it seems interesting so I open StandardNotes on my phone and write the movie to the To-Read note. This is where I keep my loose notes. I did say to not focus on organizing loose notes, but over time it is likely that you will find that you keep taking most of your notes in similar categories. These categories will emerge over time and I donât think it is useful to plan for them in advance. The To-Read notes pile comes from my need to quickly jot down articles, books, videos, games, etc that I see mentioned to check them out later. StandardNotes is my preference as it syncs on different devices and as such is always at hand.
One of my friends calls and asks if we could hang out some time and we find a time which I immediately put in the calendar. I get a notification about a classes exam dates so I note down in the calendar a week before the exam to prepare a cheat sheet.
Once I get home with groceries to make a taco recipe that I found. I really like it so I decide to write it down to my MkDocs public site so I can always find, reference, and share it later. After updating the recipe page, I share the link with a friend who shares my love for tacos.
Using a static site such as MkDocs allows me to note down specific instructions with related information that can be shared publicly and make it actionable for others as well as me. MkDocs is a site framework specifically for documentation so I use it exactly for that: actionable repeatable steps are recorded there for later reference.
After eating I check out my StandardNotes To-Read pile and find a movie the colleague mentioned, it seems interesting by the trailer so I decide to watch it. Turns out its a great flick with good thought provoking ideas. I decide that I want to write about it to get my thoughts in order about what I think about the ideas discussed in the movie. I write them down in my Second Brain public site. The Second Brain is a place to store distilled thoughts, analysis, and idea synthesis that is specific to me that I wish to remember. While MkDocs is as much about making useful to others as it is for me, then the Second Brain is a place mainly for myself and only tangentially useful to others. My Second Brain is built on Obsidian and published using Quartz, I like Obsidian because its design allows the knowledge to be in free flowing by the use of links which when visualized create a web with connections between notes. This is why I prefer references, content snippets, analysis, and synthesis to be on the Second Brain and not MkDocs: it doesnât enforce any kind of structure so it can take the shape according to how I think and process information.
After dinner, I peruse my StandardNotes To-Read list, stumbling upon the movie recommended by my colleague. Intrigued by its trailer, I decide to watch it and find it to be a captivating film with thought-provoking themes. Inspired, I jot down my reflections on my Second Brain public site - a repository for distilled thoughts and personal reflections. Built on Obsidian and published using Quartz, my Second Brain offers a space for introspective musings and idea synthesis, leveraging Obsidianâs flexible design to accommodate my thinking process with interconnected notes and free-flowing links. This distinction from MkDocsâ tightly structured instructions lies in its focus on personalizing itâs structure to take the shape of how one thinks (kind of like the links mimic connections in the brain).
All in all this is what my systems look like in a wide overview:
- Calendar: The main time management companion. While it excels at scheduling appointments and commitments, it falls short when it comes to accommodating tasks without rigid time constraints.
- Trello: A versatile sidekick to the calendar organizing projects and activities. Its flexible structure allows me to categorize tasks and prioritize them without the constraints of fixed deadlines of the calendar.
- StandardNotes: Loose notes notepad, for capturing fleeting thoughts, inspiration, and noteworthy recommendations. Its accessibility across devices ensures that no idea goes unrecorded.
- MkDocs: A simple documentation platform that serves as my repository for curated recipes, instructions, and other actionable insights. Its structure and public nature allows me to share knowledge with others as well.
- Second Brain (Obsidian with Quartz): My digital sanctuary for contemplation and synthesis. Obsidianâs interconnected note system facilitates the exploration and organization of complex ideas.
Finding meaning
Take up the Great Work, spiritually speaking, making your own philosopherâs stone.
Find a means to build control of and regulate your breath, be it through walking, running, or hiking, then apply that control to just simply sitting.
Expose, but then later extinguish, past traumas. This is sometimes called memory integration. Building this critical aspect of self-regulation will greatly aid your medications, depending on what you take.
Surround yourself with aphorisms that are not merely related to this process, but that also speak to you personally. Cultivate a collection of works that contain passages which weave their way into your mind, insidiously. This is sometimes called sublimating your thought patterns. If possible, collect them into a journal or book that you imbibe with a sense of personal meaning or sacredness.
Learn the key to mundane invisibility by being so still with your thoughts that they cease, people donât notice you (or you donât notice them), and you lose notice of yourself. We all do this for a second or two, here and there, every day. The more you paradoxically take account of this, the more possible it becomes to induce it, creating more and more room for the answer to form. Use this skill especially while sitting outside, if possible. The Power Of Now - enlightenment provides the way. The past, the future, and pain are of the mind, the present is being, truly being, expressing, and existing.