Time Management

This page documents my personal time management philosophy. I do not like too rigid of a structure, but also need to make sure the essentials are taken care of daily.

I try to keep the schedule minimal. The purpose of the schedule is to make sure that I am doing the key stuff like eating, sleeping, and exercising. It sets non-negotiable limits to my day because if I am focused on a project, I will just work 24 hours a day on it until I crash. This is great for getting a single project done, but when I have 20 ongoing projects it is a no-go. I use the same schedule every day as long as I am home. The schedule does not apply to what I would call “away missions” where it may be necessary for me to stretch my waking hours. A good example of this is the Racing Simulator which requires high productivity weekends where I may not sleep much.

Everything not covered by the schedule becomes a task. If I need a break it is a task. If I need to cook it is a task. All tasks have a few important pieces of information attached. The basic format is: title, description, criticality, allotted time, time spent, due date, and completion date. All of my tasks are kept in kanboard. I tackle tasks in the order they appear. As soon as one is completed the next begins.

I have reoccurring tasks I do weekly or monthly. Things like meal prepping for the week are usually a 3-4 hour block. I also have a couple hours set aside for cleaning things like my room, bathroom, car, shop, or office. Monthly tasks are usually banking related or checking in with people.

Old tasks are saved with a time spent and completion date so that I can reference them when creating new tasks. The allotted time is critical to prevent my tasks from spiraling. I try to avoid bikeshedding at all costs. If something comes up that does not block me from completing my current task, I take a moment to create a new task and then forget about it so that I can focus on my current task.

The purpose of my Task Assessment activity in the schedule is for me to prearrange the tasks I will be working on. I do this by looking through the full task list and ordering them by importance. I also take into account whether I have work that day or if it is one of my free days. Obviously I only do company tasks at my day job. Because the task list is open ended, it does not matter exactly how much I do in a day other than trying to stick to my allotted times. I can simply trust that the next task is the most important. I also create task groups. If several tasks require a run to town, I will try to bunch them together to minimize the time I spend traveling.

This systems works well for me because it is reasonably flexible, since I assess tasks daily, while still providing me enough structure to survive. It also gives me a sense of accomplishment as I work through the list. I find checking off items addicting. I tend to make tasks relatively short. I have found this gives me more accurate allotted times and allows me to delineate large projects in to more manageable chunks. As an added bonus, smaller tasks means more checkboxes.

I do my best to prioritize sleep. In the past I have not done this and the results were almost always bad. Having a good foundation allows me to stretch on away missions. If I am well rested, I have very little degradation on couple 4 hour nights in a row. If I try to run consistent 5 hour nights, my mind turns to mush after a couple weeks.

I tried several alternate sleep schedules in college that worked well for me on diminished sleep. Some of my best grades were achieved while concurrently studying full-time, life-guarding and working as an RA on the Everyman Sleep Schedule, but this is not very practical if you have to keep business hours. I also found that it increased my stress levels a lot. The lesson I learned was that it is a better strategy in the long run to just sacrifice those extra hours to sleep in order to have consistent performance.

In order to help regulate my sleep I use a custom daylight lamp that runs on a programmable schedule. I developed this method while using an alternate sleep schedule and it helps a lot with large variation in day lengths in the Northwest.

Even though I workout every day, I vary the intensity and activity to give my body time to recover. Usually once a week, I will have a workout dedicated to stretching. I usually have some sort of plan laid out, but I keep it confined to the hour. This means that if I am doing a lot of running, I am usually not lifting much and vise-versa.