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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

#181

Post by EGreg »

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…

Today we are faced with a three way choice:

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.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#182

Post by mwfunk »

chris_7 wrote: post #59
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.

I get tons of emails from recruiters, marketers, etc. I reply to none of them, and I think it's unfair that by sending me mail that I don't want they are implicitly entitled to labor (writing a response) from me.

I don't think anyone was suggesting that you should reply to them. The complaints are about people who are unresponsive to direct questions from their co-workers that require timely responses (at least that's how I interpreted it).

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#183

Post by noir_lord »

bootload wrote: post #171
torpfactory wrote: post #121

Some thoughts on time management: - 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 l…

"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 behaviour, though I suspect it was this very behaviour 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. Charle…

The best boss I ever had back when I worked retail used to walk the store every morning, write down all tasks for that day and then prioritise them, he then gave that to me and I just worked the list until finishing time, I asked him once if he minded I didn't get them all finished every day and he replied "Nope, I don't expect you to", it was incredibly unstressful, I always knew what I should be doing, communication overhead was low and the list was a measurable measure of progress over a day.

Last I heard he was senior management in the whole company so well deserved I'd say as a former sub-ordinate.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#184

Post by BN1978 »

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'm not going to focus on anything else but this for the next 30min/1hr

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.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#185

Post by BN1978 »

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 am "guilty" of that sometimes. And I am proud for that. For me, there are two kinds of fun: just fun and fun with some added value. Being active on the facebook, playing computer games, watching TV series is just fun. Working on my hobbies (playing an instrument, learning new stuff, working on projects I like...) is fun with added value. If I don't organize my leisure time to much time is spent on the just fun category. Yes, it is fun, but at the end of the day, I don't feel as happy and fulfilled as when I am working on fun + value category.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#186

Post by gordaco »

grecy wrote: post #170
torpfactory wrote: post #121

Some thoughts on time management: - 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 l…

> If you're a salaried employee, the company will almost always demand more time than you want to provide.... Don't expect them to value your time in any meaningful sense. Protect it for yourself in the most graceful and diplomatic way possible. 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…

I once pushed so that I could have a reasonable schedule, and I got fired pretty quickly. They literally told me that I was good at my tasks, but I wasn't putting enough time. As far as I know, their schedules were basically illegal in my country (not the USoA), although theoretically my firing was legal (they just ended my probation period).

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.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#187

Post by kahrkunne »

hinkley wrote: post #72
rdiddly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since children have it, I don't think it's a learned skill. But I think the bad habits of drifting off to another illusory time are learned, and then have to be unlearned.

when the child is doing fine, they get to live in the moment, and are often left alone to do what they are doing. When we don't like what they're up to we often talk to them about 'not yet' or 'not anymore' and time becomes something they have to contend with. And then we start doing fucked up things like asking five year olds what they want to be when they grow up. How much pressure is that? they don't even know wha…

>How much pressure is that?

From my experience of having been a kid, none. It was always exciting to think about being an adult, and it's not like your answer meant anything - I'm not on track to be becoming an astronaut after all

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#188

Post by bootload »

noir_lord wrote: post #183
bootload wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 behaviour, though I suspect it was this very behaviour 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. Charle…

The best boss I ever had back when I worked retail used to walk the store every morning, write down all tasks for that day and then prioritise them, he then gave that to me and I just worked the list until finishing time, I asked him once if he minded I didn't get them all finished every day and he replied "Nope, I don't expect you to", it was incredibly unstressful, I always knew what I should be doing, communicatio…

" I always knew what I should be doing, communication overhead was low and the list was a measurable measure of progress over a day."

It's no accident, and I'm really getting to see why this technique works. It's simple. Given you have a days work, working from a short list is do-able. If the tasks are prioritised things get done.

The bit I've found hard: when things interrupt, the old list is useless and a new one can be made to reflect this. It really is a great hack and hearing stories from people who have worked with this is a real confirmation that it can work.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#189

Post by ParadoxOryx »

ahh wrote: post #92
tptacek wrote: post #82

Weird tangent: 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 t…

Is there an easy way to remove a clock from Android? How about OSX?

On macOS, you can hold the command key and drag the clock off the menu bar.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#190

Post by Niten »

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 do something similar, but at an even lower granularity: "Needs Action", "Waiting", and just a couple other labels.

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.

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