I've been thinking about productivity & task management - in particular how to eliminate distractors from a getting stuff done I don't want to do (but have to), in order to deliberately make space to do the things I WANT to do (approaching from that "what to I want to accomplish this year"-vantage).
See this diagram of the situation and my ideal approach: https://imgur.com/a/GKoDs
I frequently have that feeling of overwhelm, analysis paralysis, spending too much time on areas I don't want to be, ignoring important areas, lots of wasted "activation energy" consumed by second guessing "Is this the right thing I should be doing?", balancing time between personal stuff, relationships, work projects, work, life goals, family, etc - you get the idea.
I've been noodling around thinking: What would be the ideal way I'd work on stuff? And in the end, I thought, I'd love to have a big week/day agenda on my wall, with a list of things I should be doing, with confidence that there is some rationale to why I am doing these exact tasks and in that exact order. And then - with that confidence negating the analysis paralysis - I'd get to work, going thru the tasks.
Below is a description of my ideal system:
Premise: Determining % time allocation to categories of activities - I read about Ben Franklin and how he categorized his time - personal, family, reading, church etc, and thought that's a pretty interesting - deliberately trying to arrive to a reasonable % time spent for each category of area you care about. Another principle I like is the idea of "pay yourself first" for personal finance - make sure your savings, retirement, etc get deducted first to the right bucket before hitting your pocket (as opposed to trying to fit in savings using remaining money). Simply - this lets me feel confident that I am thinking tactically AND strategically.
Given: Available buckets of time in a week - Given a "vanilla" week, aside from sleep, the time is spent at work (~8hr a day) and non work (~8 hour a day). If we apply the categories and allocation %s in #1 to a typical week, we'd zoom in and see that each work bucket and non-work time bucket is subdivided - "soft constraints" on time spent. Obviously not the same each day, but it'd likely even out throughout the week.
Getting to the tactical: Task list & level of effort - We start listing out the specific tasks (think Getting Things Done style) - essentially a giant list of unsorted tasks. These could live within work projects ("Create project plan for XYZ Initiative"), personal goals ("write a poem"), and even recurring tasks ("send client status report each Monday", "call grandma every Wednesday"). If possible, these tasks should be assigned a level of effort (e.g. time, Agile points). The abstract goal is to have a list of all specific & actionable tasks from every area of your life in one spot, and a rough idea of how much time each would take
Prioritize tasks - Using a model like Eisenhower Method, distribute tasks according to importance & urgency
Allocate/Schedule tasks to time buckets in the week - Given those buckets/categories of time as a model of how to spend a particular week, AND this giant pile of prioritized AND categorized actions, we should be able to automatically allocate tasks throughout a week, given hard constraints (like hours of time in a day), and soft constraints like % of time spent on each bucket, and order the tasks by urgency & importance.
"What should I be doing right now?" — As a result of distributing tasks throughout the week, this would allow a tool to have a Day view: Given all of your tasks, and given your time allocation goals, the tasks importance & urgency, you can answer the question, "What are the optimal set of tasks which I should do TODAY?" and "What should I ACTUALLY be doing right now?"
I've never seen a tool or approach which accomplishes the above, but I'd be curious if other people think this way (am I just crazy??), and if there are any tools which accomplish/approximate the above. Thoughts welcome!