(2012-03-20) Rao Calendar Hacking Time Management

Venkatesh Rao on the messiness of Calendar Hacking (Time Management). *The zeroth thing you need to know about personal time management is that in a certain theoretical sense, there are no universal systems. Only calendar hacks. What’s more, you cannot pick some compendium of calendar hacks and easily sort out the ones that will work for you. You need to learn the art of calendar hacking.

Unfortunately, without formally modeling your life in mathematical terms, defining a formal version of your specific calendar management problem, and hiring a computer science PhD to do the formal analysis, there is no easy way to tell how good your life can get. But a good default answer is “not very.”... Fortunately, you can usually get a good sense of how good it can get by looking at people with similar life-and-work styles.

The basic problem in hacking a calendar is figuring out the single most important measurable variable that captures a key watershed distinction in the space of “characters” (empty, full, messy, chaotic, packed, wide open, grueling, on-the-road, humming along and running smoothly) that your calendar can assume.*

A good general candidate for calendar management problems (for most people) is subscription level, the ratio of demands on your time to time available... Subscription level is a good default tuning knob because most of us are neither permanently under-subscribed or over-subscribed, though we may go through temporary phases in each state. It is a variable that naturally wanders over its full range. But when you are dominantly under or over-subscribed, you typically have to look for other variables. Be careful not to look only at obvious “scheduling” type variables involving time, money or energy in some form.

There is no shortage of purely arbitrary prioritization principles to help you rest on your laurels. The value of the phase-diagram approach is that it forces you to be sensitive to at least two different easy modes of operation separated by a tough mode. It forces you to extract at least one bit of actual intelligence from your surroundings.

I find PaulGraham’s Maker Schedule/Manager Schedule essay a useful guide in managing my time... As a Free Agent, the two are getting mixed up in very muddy ways. My calendar was in an “easy” Maker-dominant zone in the past year, when my consulting load was relatively low, allowing me to easily separate Writing and Consulting time, and within both, Maker and Manag Er types of work... My most basic time management decision these days is asking, thrice a day (when I get up, after lunch, and in the evening) whether I am going to try and Make something for the next 4 hours, Manage a bunch of things for the next 4 hours, or simply slack off and let myself dissipate energy by idling away on Facebook, Quora or reading randomly. The last category is important, it represents relaxation, social time and general situation awareness upkeep.