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Why time management is ruining our lives

theguardian.com

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Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#101

Post by PeterisP »

bosie wrote: post #36
moxious wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure all of your communications are so critical? There are also people who will chase others to the dog park to tell them that a CI build passed...

i don't follow how you got to the snarky "critical" if andyidsinga is ignoring 40% of emails?

Well, because it would be reasonable to assume that 40% of a typical business user received emails are something that should be ignored.

e.g. 10% of all emails are critical, important or urgent, 30% of emails aren't critical but need a response, additional 20% don't need a response but must be understood, and 40% are just "organizational noise".

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#102

Post by Malarkey73 »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #89
andyidsinga wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Most important time is now; I've been thinking about this occasionally -- it never quite sat right with me. 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 cer…

David Mitchel has some interesting (and humorous) thoughts on this issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HTt6QJqzxk

Loved that.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#103

Post by PeterisP »

nether wrote: post #8
colund wrote: post #4

I manage my time by stopping reading after a few sections when I realize that the article does not contain information that will matter to me for real. 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"

Why should one stay hungry? What about conquering one's insatiability, and becoming content?

Well, being content and happy with your current state is pretty much not compatible with high ambition and continually striving to achieve more, it's a tradeoff.

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."

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#104

Post by vizeroth »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #88
rauljara wrote: post #16

My favorite quote from the article: > 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.

I see this attitude fairly pervasively in hacker news when it comes to consuming media. 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 becaus…

American adults read so little that this attitude only comes from a minority of the minority. For the most part, people see it as a waste of time because they may only read 1-4 books a year, so they might feel those books should have some meaningful purpose in their lives (or they only read a book because it is supposed to be great or have some use they can apply to their lives).

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.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#105

Post by sjg007 »

austinl wrote: post #76

> “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!’” 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 ti…

I take the top 3 most important things and do those.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#106

Post by JW_00000 »

BN1978 wrote: post #70
ryandrake wrote: post #61

I've never actually achieved Zero Inbox, but I'm pretty close. One thing that helps is to create meaningful, actionable folders for your E-mails. I have these: 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…

I like your system for emails. You inspired me to do add to my Trello list: "Try ryandrake system for my inbox."

You've just added an item to your to-do list to organize your to-do list. Isn't this the exact thing the article was criticising?

> "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!’"

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#107

Post by fencepost »

wcummings wrote: post #83
rdiddly wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so you're one of those folks who doesn't answer my emails! Makes me pester you multiple times, by email, SMS, Skype, and if I'm truly desperate, the dog park. You're just outsourcing the work of communication onto me. When you ask for a favor I will pretend I didn't hear it! Winky emoticon.

You're not entitled to other peoples' time. Email lets your interrupt people 24/7, if you don't take that responsibility seriously expect to be ignored sometimes. Your priorities are not their priorities.

If email is interrupting you 24/7 then you're treating it as a synchronous medium instead of an asynchronous one. I get a LOT of requests that I respond to with "can you email that to me?" because I'm often away from my desk and working on something else. Sometimes I'll look at subject lines in the notification area on my phone, but the only messages that get looked at immediately even during the work day are ones from a small number of people and notifications of antivirus events from our monitoring system.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#108

Post by chiefalchemist »

Being efficient is not the same as being effective. Focusing on scheduling for the sake of filling time is a fool's errand.

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.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#110

Post by ilaksh »

My solutions: be unpopular, avoid adding appointments, avoid starting new projects, don't create to-do lists. Instead of long to-do lists I just focus on prioritizing realistically and try to take care of the next few really important things in a thorough way. And I try to make sure feedback loops are relatively tight so I can keep reprioritizing correctly.

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.

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