Now that I‘ve actually read what I‘ve written a few weeks ago 😉 … I‘ve obviously had some time to reflect. About more models of managing your time, about integrating such models in your daily life, their limits, and, of course, about the underlying force, the “why” behind all that.
While trying to adjust myself to the spacious world of home office, I especially came to notice, that time management itself probably wasn‘t the actual issue I was trying to improve. Sure enough, there are several antipatterns of time mismanagement that can easily lead to excessive spending, something you can improve with simple Home Office installations, e.g. having a clock clearly visible from your point of view – and, sensibly, one clearly visible from your cofee machine… These are about making time perceptible, especially when you‘re not the type of person with absolutely fixed times for lunch, or such mundane concepts.
But then, there‘s a certain limit to the amount of improvement you can easily gain from managing time alone. Sure, you could try to apply every single life hack you find online, but then again, the internet isn‘t very good in accounting for differences in personal psychology. The thing you can do, is trying to establish a few recommendations at a certain time and shaking established habits, but you need to evaluate their effect. Not everything is pure gold. For example, my last blog post pointed to the Pomodoro technique, where one will find that there are classes of work that can easily be scheduled into 25-30 minute blocks. But there are others where this restriction leads to more complications than it solves. Another “life hack” the internet throws at you at every opportunity is having a certain super-best time to set your alarm clock to, and I would advise to try to shuffle this once in a while to find out whether there‘s some setting that is best for you. But never think that you need e.g. the same rising pattern as Elon Musk in order to finish your blog post in time… Just keep track of yourself. How would other people know your default mode?
Now overall, each day feels different a bit, and it‘s a function of your emotional state as well as some generic randomness that has no less important effects on your productivity than a set of rules you can just adhere to. So, instead on focussing on managing your time on a given day, we could think of actually trying to manage your productivity. But then again, “productivity management” sounds so abstract that the handles we would think of are about stuff like
- what you eat
- how you sleep
- how much sports you‘re willing to do
- how much coffee you consume
and other very profound parameters of your existence. That‘s also something you can just play around a bit until you find an obvious optimum. (Did you know that the optimum amount of breakfast beer for you is likely to be zero?… … :P)
However, if you keep on fine tuning every single aspect for the rest of your life like a maniac, you risk to loose yourself in marginal details, without gaining anything.
So if you‘re still reading – we now return in trying to solve what it actually is that we want to manage. And for me, the best model is thinking about managing motivation. Not the general “I guess I am better off with a job than without one”-motivation, but the very real daily motivation that makes you jump from one task into the next one. The one that drives maximum output from your given time without actually having to manage your time itself. There are always days of unsteady condition, but by trying to avoid systematic interferences with your motivation, you can achieve to maximize their output, as well.
At a very general level (and as outlined above), one crucial ingredient in motivational management, for me, is the circumstance of following a self-made schedule. By which of course, I mean, you arrange your day to cooperate with your colleagues and customers, but it has to feel like as much a voluntary choice as possible within your given circumstances.
Then, there‘s planning ahead. Sounds trivial. But you can be the type of person that plans several weeks in advance, or the one that is actually unsure about what happens next monday – the common denominator is avoiding to worry about a kind of default course of events for a few days in a row. We all know that tasks like to fill out more time than they actually require, so you get some backlog one way or another; but if you manage to feel like your time is full of doing something worthwile, it‘s way easier to start your day at a given moment than when you try to arrange tasks of varying importance on-the-fly.
One major point – which I was absolutely amazed by, when I chose to believe it – is, that you can stop a task at many times, without losing your train of thought, not just when it‘s finished. So often, one fears the expected loss of concentration when he realizes that a single task will not fit in a limited time box. But unless you are involuntarily interrupted, and unless you somehow give in to the illusion that the brain is somehow capable of multi-tasking*, you can e.g. shift whole subsections of a given task to the next morning in a conscious manner, and then quickly return to your old concentration.
On the other hand, there‘s the concept of Maker vs. Manager Cycles. Briefly,
- Someone in a “Manager” mode has a lot of (mostly) smaller issues, spread over many different topics, often only loosely connected, often urgent, and sometimes without intense technical depth. The Manager will gain his (“/her” implied henceforth) motivation surely by getting a lot of different topics done in a short time, thus benefit from a tight, low-overhead schedule. He can apply artificial limits to his time boxes and apply the Pareto rule thoroughly: (“About 80% of any result usually stems from about 20% of the tasks”).
- However, someone in “Maker” mode probably has a more constrained set of tasks – like a programmer trying to construct a new feature with clearly defined requirements, or a number of multiple high-attention issues – which he wisely bundled into blocks of similar type – will benefit from being left alone for some hours.
For a more thorough discussion, I‘ll gladly point to the discussion of Paul Graham, as Claudia thankfully left in our comment section last time 😉
Which brings me to my final point. I found one of the strongest key to daily motivation lies in the fundamental acceptance of these realities. As outlined above, there just are some different subconscious modes, and different external circumstances, that drive your productivity to a larger scale than you can manipulate. If you already adopted a set of measures and found they did a good job for you, you better not worry if there‘s some kind of a blue day where everything seems to lead to nowhere. You can lose more time by over-optimization than you could gain from super-finely-tuned efficiency. You probably already know this, but do you also embrace it?
(* in my experience, and while I sometimes find myself still trying to do this, multi-tasking is not an existing thing. If you firmly believe otherwise, be sure to drop me a note in the comments..)
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