About time, slavery and tomatoes

Introduction

I’ve been reading Habr for quite a long time, and I’ve seen posts about time management and how to “improve my life in 5 minutes” many times. It so happened that about a year and a half ago, I myself became interested in time management, and since then I have constantly experienced various techniques hoping to compile something of my own that fully satisfies my needs. A couple of months ago, I once again revised my approach to time management, and it seems that I found something asymptotically striving for the ideal :). This is the method I want to share with the respected habrauser in the hope that someone will be able to learn something from it.

One size fits all? Crap.

At the very beginning I will say one thing that I realized about a year after I started doing time management: there is no universal technique that would suit the absolute majority of people. As well as there is no methodology that will suit you personally one hundred percent. Look around: do you see at least two absolutely identical people? True, all people are different. Each has its own system of values, outlook on life and the rhythm of this very life. So why then are the time management gurus trying to push us thirty-three bags of “absolutely universal and super-duper effective time management techniques”? The answer is simple: because they make money :). If you want to find a technique that really suits you, then you have to work hard. It will take a lot of time until you go over different methods and make up something unique and not similar to others from their pieces. However, the game is worth the candle. If you pass to the end, you will really become more productive and your life will become much fuller and richer. Just do not wait for the magic red pill, which in the blink of an eye will take you to the country of successful personalities; after all, change is not a quick thing.
So, from the above, the following follows: the method described below works well for me personally. It’s not a fact that it will work just as well for the head of a large corporation and the cleaning lady Tyot Masha. The purpose of this article is to give food for thought and a couple of "building blocks" that may be useful to others in building their own system.
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Step 1. Structure.

It has long been known that information is perceived much better when it has a certain structure than when its various pieces are piled into one pile and thoroughly mixed. Have you ever noticed that the posts like "10 ways to lose weight", "15 worst phrases in bed", "3 steps on the way to world domination" are much more popular than all the others? The secret of success is simple: our brain loves lists :). At least he loves them more than a ten-page dull text sheet. You can use this feature (yes, how it is possible, necessary!) When planning your time.
When I first started doing time management, I used EssentialPIM. In it, it was possible to create a tree-like structure of affairs, thus breaking up its tasks into logical categories. This approach seemed to me quite acceptable, until I found out about such a great thing as Mind Maps . In essence, the thought-card represents the same tree structure, however, it displays it in a much more convenient form.
I tried using the Mind Manager program for maintaining the task list, and it remained so on it :). The program has a nice interface, a sane standard template and convenient hot keys, with which you can easily manage the map with just one keyboard.
My to-do list of tasks looks like this:



As you can see, tasks are assigned priorities from 3 to 1. A unit means a very important thing, a troika is not a very important one :). On the formulation of tasks, perhaps, you can give only one piece of advice: formulate the task so that it is immediately clear what needs to be done. For example, if you create the “Food” task, you will have to think about what kind of food it is and what you had in mind yesterday. If you formulate the task in the form “Go to the store for food”, you no longer need to think, you have to do it :).

Step 2. Distribute.

Have you noticed that on the map only one task is assigned a specific date? This is no accident :). I noticed that the so-called “lazy planning” works best for me, when the time to complete a task is determined as late as possible. It works like this. Suppose you need to go to the dentist. You call the doctor and are recorded for a specific time. Now you know for sure that on Tuesday at 16:00 you should be in the clinic. In this case, you have no choice but to assign a specific date and time to this task. And now let's say that you need to write an article on Habr. Agree, you are not very critical when exactly you will write it: on Tuesday, or on Wednesday; at 9:00 or 10:30. Therefore, it is better to leave this task as it is and deal with it when there is time and mood.
Now we are moving smoothly on how to make a list of tasks to how to, in fact, plan your day. In this regard, I use the same lazy approach :). To begin with, I am looking for tasks that are clearly distributed today (the same trip to the dentist). I appreciate the time it takes to complete this task and add it to my to-do list. Then I sort the remaining tasks according to their priority and add them to the list, having previously estimated the execution time. Addition occurs as long as the total time to be spent on the tasks does not exceed a certain limit. For myself, I found out that this limit is about six hours. Once the task list is formed, you can start to perform them. With clearly distributed tasks and so everything is clear, but in what sequence to perform all the others? The obvious answer is by priority :). However, I do not always follow this rule, and sometimes I first perform those tasks that are more interesting to me.
Now it is worth making a small lyrical digression, and say why it works. Usually, day planning implies a clear distribution of all available time. For example, at 7:00 rise, at 7:30 breakfast, and so on. Here we are waiting for several problems at once.

1. Many people write down all tasks in such a schedule, even such obvious ones as breakfast, a trip to work and tooth brushing. Then, with a sense of accomplishment, they are marked as fulfilled, thus creating the illusion of productive work. No need to prevaricate. Brushing your teeth is not a task, but an everyday routine. The list should include only real cases that are not repeated day after day.
2. It is not always possible to adequately estimate the time taken by the task. And if your day is tightly packed with affairs, and you do not have time to do any of them at a set time, it turns out to be a disaster of a personal scale. You see that you already need to do another thing, start to get nervous, further reducing productivity, and, in the end, do not bring to mind either the current business, or the following. In the end, it all grows like a snowball, leaving you at the end of the day with a feeling of dissatisfaction. But if you do not set clear boundaries for yourself, then there will be no cause for concern. If you slightly underestimate the top bar for the total time occupied by all the affairs, you will always know that there is still some time left in stock.
3. Fortunately, life almost never goes as we planned. It often happens that a task requires immediate execution. If you have a clear schedule for the whole day, you will have to think about how to redistribute your tasks in order to make room for a problem that suddenly arises. If you just have a task list, you don’t have to think again :). You can simply say to yourself: “OK, I will complete this task now, and deal with the rest later.” At the same time, you will not have a feeling of incongruence, since you did not initially plan your business for a certain time of the day.

Step 3. Profit!

Having understood all the principles listed above, I realized that not a single program on the market today can fully satisfy my requirements. Ok, then we will write our own :). After n days of coding, I got about the following:



Mind Planner can read the * .xmmap files saved in the Mind Manager and get basic information about the tasks from them: priority, start and end dates, duration and degree of completion. Tasks can be displayed both as a list (which can be sorted) and as a tree. On the left is the calendar and to-do list, and in the center is the “day view”, on which tasks with a clearly set time are marked.
At first, I did only generate a report for the day in the form of a PDF, but then I quickly realized that instead of printed sheets it was much more convenient to use my Sony reader. Thus, one more button was added, dumping the report directly onto the device. This is how it looks on the device itself:

Garbage day? >:}

It would seem, and here tomatoes and slavery? The fact is that during my experiments with time management I came across methods that made me raise an eyebrow in surprise. For example, time tracking is so popular today. It is, of course, good to know how long it takes to complete a task. Noticing the time when you started the business and the time when you finished it, you will receive an excellent feedback and gradually learn how to more adequately assess the time. But to push the big red button every time you digress to scratch your nose is, in my opinion, too much.
Another example of paranoid time management is the so-called “Pomodoro technique”. This technique is that you take a timer for 25 minutes, start it and do one thing while it is ticking. When time expires, a break is taken. After four such "chardzhey" is a longer break. Proponents of this method claim that ticking a timer helps to focus and stay extremely attentive. Perhaps for some it works, but I think that such a technique is a sure way to turn into a neurotic :). Just imagine: a timer ticks under your ear the whole day, dictating to you when you should work and when to rest.
I believe that these and other similar techniques - a clear bend, and they bring much more harm than good. For some reason, many people forget that we manage time, and not vice versa. They try to plan their day in advance by seconds, carefully log each sneeze into their logs, tense up in order to have time to do something in another twenty-five-minute ... labeled "time management." They become slaves of their techniques and all their thoughts are reduced only to what you have to do. And then more! And further! Faster, higher, stronger!
I believe that life should be fun. Yes, it is much better to be a productive person than an inert amoeba. And I am sure that only by enjoying what you are doing can you achieve real heights of productivity. This is not an easy path, and there is no short cut. Technicians offering them to you are silent about the fact that these roads usually lead to galleys, where you will be working for a while, and not it for you.

UPD: In the comments asked to put MindPlanner and complained about the lack of the ability to add tasks manually. Laid out, added :). MindPlanner (you need .NET Framework 3.5 to work)