Time management

1 Meta problem: searching for productivity advice

Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Via productiva.

Before we dive in, here is a bitter lesson upfront; If your goal is to be productive, you should work and not read blog posts. If you are looking for a way to be productive, stop reading this now and do whatever you’re supposed to be doing.

2 Time management: the basics

Avoid yak shaving.

3 Tracking stuff

Apps that monitor my activities to help me be more productive. Let’s be careful how we use our metrics. Don’t Goodhart yourself. Still, seeing where that time went is a helpful way to decide what to do next.

ActivityWatch is an app that automatically tracks how you spend time on your devices.

It can be used to keep track of your productivity, time spent on different projects, bad screen habits, or just to understand how you spend your time.

Alternatively, there’s the classic RescueTime. Although it wanting to spy on our keyboard input is a bit creepy. I do not trust this closed-source app to monitor my typing. We might prefer ActivityWatch in that case, since it’s open-source and very privacy-focused.

Workflowy should probably be filed differently, but it seems popular among the Akrasia crowd, e.g. integrating with Intend.

More over at quantified self.

4 Theory: time discounting etc

Paul Graham: How to Lose Time and Money

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I’d feel like something was terribly wrong.

And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

Content: * Lecture #8 – My Method for Defeating Procrastination

For more, we can look at intertemporal decisions.

5 Advanced: Autoblackmail-based time-discounting management

Weaponise your social guilt and loss aversion for personal gain! Use other biases against the time management bias.

Welcome to the world of goal-setting apps.

The next level up is the world of commitment contracts.

• Beeminder is a full-featured quantified-self commitment contract with a progress tracker.

• stickk offers basic commitment contracts

• pact is not just loss-driven; it also pays kickbacks, which is an interesting twist

  • Make a weekly Pact to exercise more or eat healthier. Set what you’ll pay other Pact members if you don’t reach it.
  • Meet Your Goals Use the Pact app to track your progress.
  • Reap the rewards Earn real cash for living healthily, paid by the members who don’t!

5.1 Beeminder in particular

Beeminder is totally my jam, and it’s how I get through life.

It integrates with a bunch of other apps, notably IFTTT Zapier, and Todoist.

More inspo:

• Beeminder Blog
• Beeminder API Reference

Bonus: There’s a lesser-known graphical editor/visualizer/SVG generator: road.beeminder.com

6 Gamification

Of course, we can harness the power of turning things into games to turn our time into a game. Same idea as above, but the rewards and costs become points and levels and badges or whatever.

Examples:

• Habitica:

  Habitica is a video game to help you improve real life habits. It “gamifies” your life by turning all your tasks (habits, dailies, and to-dos) into little monsters you have to conquer. The better you are at this, the more you progress in the game. If you slip up in life, your character starts backsliding in the game.

• SuperBetter

  At the heart of SuperBetter is the Live Gamefully® method, a framework that brings the psychological strengths and mindset of gameplay to real life.

  The method promotes new levels of personal growth as a result of stress and change. That’s why it’s called SuperBetter.

Others? I thought there were more, but I haven’t seen any recently.

Anyway, I won’t research that because gamification, at least as practised by these apps, doesn’t seem to motivate me.

7 Mutual time management

Possible exception to the social media timewasting rule: Social networks for mutual social productivity: mutual inspection: “Mutual shame, mutually agreed upon”, or the crowdsourced, opt-in panopticon. Examples:

Intend has an element of this, through social commitment: it encourages us to commit to doing some things, then tick off doing them, publicly. It also has “rooms” for mutual inspection of concentration. The flagship room (which is free) is probably the Less Wrong Study Hall.

See also other social productivity systems under online collaboration.

8 Habit design

Aligning the things I do by default with the things I need to be doing. There’s a lot to say here, and it’s important in my daily life. Two books I’m interested in reading along these lines are Clear (2018) and Tracy (2007).

9 What I do in practice

I use Beeminder to incentivise myself to finish things through public commitments and loss aversion.

I wrote a custom app. See: danmackinlay/beemed: A macOS/iOS/Apple Watch minimalist Beeminder tracker

I wonder if I could keep Beeminder and use some other services to do the time tracking?

It would have to integrate with Beeminder, of course, directly or via web automation. I should probably set up my flashcards to integrate with Beeminder, for example.

10 Doing good stuff

• Andrew Montalenti’s Queue of queues hack that unifies the various to-do lists into a master to-do list (using, in his case, sunsama).

• The Pomodoro technique.

  • Web-based timer
  • Web-based timer 2 (with fancy notifications)
  • Various smartphone/tablet apps exist, e.g. that integrate pomodoro timers with tracking.

• Team pomodoros are a thing

  • Intend, discussed below,
  • Cuckoo
  • Teamodoro: pomodoro timer for teams
  • CLOQ
  • Marinara by 352

  I wonder if I could integrate a pomodoro timer into my MS Teams status? Looks like I can.

  • Use Microsoft To Do and Power Automate to set Teams to Focusing status during a Pomodoro
  • RoundPie App (AFAICT formerly Pomodoneapp) supports that kind of integration via Zapier

• Boss as a service:

  1. Send us your todos.
  2. Send proof you completed them.
  3. Send us a screenshot, or some other proof that you finished them. If you don’t, we will take you to task. If you default, we will follow up with you, and not stop bugging you till it’s resolved.

11 Incoming

Zapier recommends some Flowtime technique timers that integrate well with it, but Zapier, for all that it is an excellent service, is outrageously expensive (USD20/month for basic, USD49 for professional; I couldn’t do anything interesting that interested me on the free tier). Tmetric looks pretty. AFAICT, Toggl tracking is better for the integrations I want. It is nearly as expensive as Intend, though, if I need the paid version (USD9/month), although the free one is fine. I would pay half that much. Zapier also reviews some classic Pomodoro timers. Pomodone looks like the most natural fit — USD4/month for the good version.

• The natural home for AI agents is your Reminders app (Interconnected)

• A simpler way to organize your work

• Amazing Marvin - Customizable Task Manager and Daily Planner

• Todoist: The to do list to organize work & life

• Stop trying to try and try

• How to Set Goals Like A Googler

• TODOs from Paper Systems

  To make you feel pride rather than stress or shame, the ideal features of a todo system are something like:

  1. Accomplishments accumulate
  2. Long-term scope to see the arc of your success
  3. Multiple levels of scope to get sense of reward at multiple scales
  4. Recognize that tasks and events all compete for one resource—time
  5. Limit your daily tasks and get “Bonus Time”
  6. Clear visual families & dependencies, probably through spatial organization

12 References