- 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.
Your manager gets what Merlin Mann could not, the most important tasks are the ones you need to do ^right now^, to completion.
It's interesting that Bethlehem Steel is mentioned. Charles R. Schwab, the Bethlehem Steel boss, someone who Thomas Edison described as a ^hustler^, engaged Ivy Ledbetter Lee to improve productivity at Bethlehem for managers. [1] What is not mentioned is the fact Lee was a business owner of an early PR company and approached Bethlehem for business. His hack to Bethlehem management, set aside 15 minutes at the end of a day and specify six tasks you need done tomorrow;
* Prioritise them, one to six;
* Do each task, in order, till finished;
* Work your arse off;
* Left-over tasks are added to tomorrows list;
* Repeat;
I coin this, JIT task task management [3] and that simple behaviour your manager shows reflects this simple idea. I Merlin Mann totally misses this fact. [4] I was so impressed with Lees idea I wrote an article and some software to explore this idea.
References
[1] James Clear, "The Ivy Lee Method" ~ http://jamesclear.com/ivy-lee
[2] "Zero Tasks: Maximum Six. Add new tasks to leftovers. Prioritise. Kill one task at a time. Repeat.", http://seldomlogical.com/2016/NOV/19/zero-tasks/
[3] A month ago: " To-Do Lists Are Not the Answer to Getting Things Done" ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999565#13002833
[4] Merlin Mann, "Inbox Zero" (July 23, 2007) ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk
Last I heard he was senior management in the whole company so well deserved I'd say as a former sub-ordinate.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Time boxing is also very helpful to me. Very useful tool. It helps me to focus and not to get overwhelmed with the complexity of the task or disturbed by other items on my to-do list. To work on something for 15 or 30 minutes is achievable even for tasks I feel resistance to. And often, after this 15-30 minutes, it is much easier to continue working on it.
1) Just do the task yourself every time
2) Build a system to do the task every time
3) Get an open source system and learn how to configure it and hope it does everything
In the end, #3 wins if you can afford to hire people who know the system.
Not saying it's preferable to #3, but it's better than nothing. SAP and Oracle still pull in a combined $57 billion annually, for things like accounting systems...
> 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.
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?
Read more, worry less about what others think. I read an average of a book a week (and I'm a slow reader), and most people find that to be argument enough to read whatever I want.
> To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
-- C.S. Lewis
While I unapologetically consume plenty of fiction and television just for entertainment purposes, I seem to be on some mission to find only the highest quality stuff. So, what I consume ends up being dense, cerebral, and often dark. And while it's enriching and engaging, it also isn't exactly relaxing, and doesn't help me to relax and turn off when I perhaps should.
I was surprised to find that I felt guilty about consuming just-fine mindless entertainment, and also surprised about how good it felt when I actually did.
As in - oh, 'you want to interview here'?
- 'where are your side projects'? - 'why don't you have 20 github pushes a day'? - 'what open source have you contributed to'? - 'why don't you know all the JS frameworks'?
- 'eat, sleep, code, repeat' ...
:)
- 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.
> - Most important time is now;
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.
In his book The Power of Now, he writes that we require clock time thinking to actually exist and achieve our goals in life. With clock time, we remain mostly in the present, with our goals and plans presently in our minds while we make logical choices about how to fit all that into the time available to us.
However, psychological time draws our mind away from the only period in time that actually exists: right now. We immerse ourselves into narratives about past guilts or wrongs, and get carried away with the feelings that arise. Or we fantasize about personal narratives of victory, power and wealth. Or wallow in anxious worry about all the horrors that could befall us in the future.
'Only live in the now' means primarily to give up meandering about in psychological time.
Regarding your other points - the past and future technically do not exist. Only the now exists - living only in the past or future would require one to be completely content in living in their own fantasy world.
Being in the present is a skill that is learned, not a disorder.
Time is expression of sorrow. Past time is full of regrets, future time is full of apprehension.
Sage advice no matter who it's from.
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 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.
This pretty much filters all non-important emails. It's amazing.
https://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-life.html
Your one and only goal for processing your inbox is to make it empty. Not to actually do anything productive, because processing email is inherently anti-productive. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing work here. Just get it over with as quickly as possible.
> "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!’"
I haven't actually watched Mann's talks and only have a second-hand understanding of Inbox Zero as a concept, so maybe this is just rehashing his ideas, but the reason I like this approach is that I avoid spending the time and mental effort classifying incoming messages more than once.
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.
I'd add that priorities are key to being productive but not overwhelmed.
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.
For the majority of situations this means easier comprehension/scanning and zero redundancy. It also provides good practice for anything that needs more than a single line.
For longer emails I also like to put a summary at the top, then an expanded details below as necessary, and make sure each paragraph starts a new point or item.
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.
Every word you type costs the company money, compounded by how many people see the email. Make your words count.
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.
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.
I actually really hate being that "Hey, didja read that E-mail I sent?" guy, but if you're not responsive, I am going to have to pay you a visit. And I have no idea when you're in the zone and when you're just chilling. If you would just answer your E-mail, then you get to do it at the best time for you.
One thing I've found helpful over the years is: When you are depending on getting a response, say so. "NEED RESPONSE BY EOD TUESDAY" Make it the very first thing in the body of the E-mail, or even make it the subject of the E-mail, since some people only skim the subjects.
Another tip is to state clearly what assumption you will make about their thoughts if you do not hear back in time: "If I don't hear back by EOD, we will go forward with the proposal."
EDIT: Another good tip I forgot to mention: If your E-mail is going to multiple people, and you need one or more of them to respond or take action, type their Full Name in bold and red then ":" then the specific action the need to take and by when. This helps people who only scan their E-mails, as their name stands out.
Most of these tips are actually pretty obvious, it seems silly to even write them down.
If that isn't a compelling argument, keep in mind that many engineers have varying degrees of ADHD, and email is a huge distraction from getting what they normally do done. Every context switch is painful, so they often put it on mute.
There are also people who will chase others to the dog park to tell them that a CI build passed...
Also - the management-by-walking-around part ensures I get face/voice time with many people in my immediate circles.
If you're not in my immediate circle, and you're a stranger, its very true that the dog-park might be your best bet :)
I don't mean to down-play what you're saying though -- there is a level of frustration that can occur. I've just found that keeping human contact with people is the salve to not responding to emails.
Email is good for a lot of things, but not for expecting processing quickly.
I generally get back to people or read messages, but only when I spend an hour going through things when I have free time. I don't feel obligated to respond to random messages on their timeline.
Would you prefer to operate by your own priorities or theirs?
My boss at one company would call meetings with an agenda that he set and then step out of the meeting to answer phone calls from his boss. Then six or eight of us sat around trying to figure out what to talk about without him not there. Tremendous waste of time. Several man hours per incident. And if not for that personality flaw I would have called him a good boss.
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.
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 :)
Now I ignore, delete after a set period of time and have a written procedure in my home directory.
If they had done this for 15 separate projects, 14 times that meeting could actually have been a waste of time, but on the 15th project they saved all this time and they'd still come out net ahead due to the meetings.
What makes this even more pernicious is that there's such a huge discrepancy in possible time wasted, but depending on personal preference it might feel very different to the people involved. For "hacker" or builder types, any meeting at all might feel like a brutal waste of time even if it saves time in the long run, they'd personally rather waste a few days building the wrong thing than sit in a bunch of meetings. But manager types can take this to the other extreme, they feel productive in meetings and end up scheduling too many of them. As always finding a good middle ground is important.
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.
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.
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"
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."
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.
We all have ethical responsibilities that require doing things that we don't want to do.
> Don't waste time reading stuff which is boring but... "stay hungry... stay foolish"
this!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
[System Preferences has a lot to offer for many things, including custom keyboard shortcuts and such]
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!
- 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.
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/)
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
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 :)
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.
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
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.
So it's useful to think about having high autonomy, high alignment, and slack - for one's own individual life.
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.
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":
Organizations are not people.
That's why we work harder despite being more efficient.