Time Management

A realistic guide for maximizing productivity

Apr 02, 2024

Intro

I’ve done a lot of reflecting about time management over the years - does that sound lame? - and so I have a few ideas that I have collected and I try to structure my day by. They won’t fix your life, or tell you what to do with your time, but they provide a good framework that I have arrived at through trial and error. I have lots of footnotes (you know what they say about footnotes being like answering the door during sex?).1 Again, I don’t take much credit for anything here, I’ve mostly ~~stolen~~ collected from others, but if I have not given credit where it is due, I apologize and please @ me.

Constraints

Time management is fundamentally an optimization problem. There are different strategies for optimization, but almost all of them involve setting constraints. Here are the ones I use to establish my daily habits, again with copious footnotes on why I use the specific values that you may or may not care about.

Sleep: 8 hours2

Morning Routine: 1.5 hours, for waking up, getting ready, eating breakfast and such.

Exercise: 1.5 hours time allotment total for getting to and from the gym, with 50 minutes exercise time actually expected at some point throughout the day. Minimum of 30 minutes per day, on average, if time is tight.3

Evening Routine: 2.5 hours.

No work past the routine cutoff. Relax!
Last chance for a meal right at the start. You don’t want to eat too close to bed time. Should be relatively small, so as not to cause indigestion while trying to fall asleep. Keep it under 500 Calories.4
If you haven’t had time to get to the gym, you can squeeze in a quick workout, but wrap it up before you’re within 1 hour of target sleep time.
If you worked our early good for you, relax, spend time with family and friends, or hobby.
No Screens within an hour of bed; kindle and audiobooks okay.

Take a day off each week. Don’t do anything that is “work” Try not to spend it scrolling, connect with people, have a nice walk, compete in a sport, do chores, be a human being.

Magically if you plug in these constraints the remaining time matches the scant empirical data that exists on the diminishing marginal absolute productivity of workers, suggesting a 63 hour5 per week upper-limit on work. Admittedly, they were making shells during WWII, not writing code, or strategizing about marketing or writing emails, but still, nice to see the Math Mathing. I think it’s significant to note that the net profit of additional work past this threshold was not just 0, it was negative owing to mistakes. This suggests that if you’re far above this threshold, net output (however you measure it, besides hours workd), increases by reducing hours. This is a profoundly contradictory insight but one we should consider deeply. I’m looking at you medical/legal/finance early career hazing practices. 👀

Now with that out of the way, and with apologies if you are one of those people that has to read the footnotes - you’ll never get that time back - onto how I structure my day, in an ideal world, which mine often is not.

Mornings

Some things stack well. Should you workout if you haven't eaten anything in the past 4 hours? Probably not (stop yelling at me fasted cardio folks). I’ve fainted more than once in the gym, and after cardiac testing both times, I’m happy to report the ol’ ticker is fine, and it was very likely due to low blood sugar and extreme exertion.

Ideal Exercise

So what I like to do is have a little bit of carbs with medium to high glycemic index - fruit is good - and follow the advice of Tim Ferris’ 30-30-30 rule. 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, followed by at least 30 minutes of walking or other low intensity workout. If you wanna be efficient and your wife doesn't mind you turning on the blender while she's asleep, throw some protein powder with some fruit and ice, and you've got pretty much all the preworkout you need.

After this get yourself to the gym and swallow that frog early. There are few reasons for this. One, your health is basically the primary determinant of maximizing the sum of productive hours in your life. It’s the most important thing, and for me it's also one of the hardest things, and the easiest for me to excuse myself from for whatever reason throughout the day. Therefore I put it first, I make sure I don’t have commitments before it that will weigh on it or rush me. It’s simple, but not easy. There is lots that can be said about intensity, durations, schedules. But basically this is just about setting aside the time, and 90 minutes a day, accounting for travel time to and from the gym, is sufficient to optimize health. If you need more than that you are in the realm of amateur or professional athlete, and we are no longer optimizing for maximum productive years.

Skipping Morning Exercises

What happens if you don’t exercise first thing in the morning?

You don’t get the energy boost for the rest of your day, especially for your first tasks, which is ideally your most important task.
Exercising in the morning allows you to get sweaty and then get ready. If you don’t do it first thing in the morning, you basically end up needing to shower and get ready twice. This can actually be a benefit if you have evening plans.
There is another argument in favor of exercising later in the day. Peak metabolic activity and measured strength are highest about 10 hours after waking.6 So if you are a performance athlete, then it’s possible training at this time has some advantages, possibly if you are doing 2-a-day workouts. It’s all the more critical to eat.
Exercise can be moved to night if you’re too busy, just try to finish exercise before you’re within an hour of sleep time, else it may reduce your somnolence (i.e. wake you the fuck up).

Structure

Time Blocks

Humans have natural attention cycles. And we also have an attentional switching cost. That switching cost not only kicks in when we simply stop doing something - in fact we can take ‘meditative’ breaks where our subconscious is still engaged with something - but when we switch types of tasks or are anticipating and important tasks like a meeting. That's why you are typically a lot less productive in the hours before a meeting7 than if you are free for the rest of the day. Therefore, it’s synergistic to group blocks together back to back, to stay in the same thinking mode, and to take breaks intermittently, that do not lead to distractions. That means if you pick up your phone to check work emails and get annoyed at your incompetent colleague, you’ve broken some of the flow state that you could have in your focus. Again, not always possible, but if you have the scheduling autonomy to turn your phone off during your focus blocks, it’s a great aid.

Regarding the ratio of work to break time, ultradian attention cycles are somewhere between 90 and 180 minutes. So fitting that into the tyranny of our hour dominated world, I like to block out 2-hour sections to work, and implicitly know that I’m either taking a long break (20-30 min) at the beginning or the end of that cycle (not both!). Breaks can be eating, bathroom breaks, going for a walk, stretching. But nothing that significantly draws your intellect into something else. Avoid the phone at all costs. Do not surf the web or check the news, etc.

The focus time does not mean you need to force yourself to be continuously active for the full 90 minutes. I heard an author talk once about his writing practice. He allows himself to sit and stare, at the page, at the ceiling, out the window, to do nothing, as long as he is in his writing position. Meaning his office. This is wise. You do not allow yourself to get distracted with something else, but you don’t force yourself into mindless activity.

Coming off your workout - if you decide to do that in the morning - you will probably want to have a second meal to set you up for the rest of the day, and replenish protein/carbs. But hey, I don’t know your life, maybe you hate food. For me, the combination of exercise and food - and i mean the relief of it being over and the small solace the not being empty provides me - mark pretty much the apex of my mental day.

Therefore, the next most important thing that you need to do, is the most important long term work for your career. Again this is ideal. My days often get all mixed up in terms of time, but I try to prioritize the most important long term thing first and to do it as long as possible before I am interrupted by other things; usually 2-4 hours. 2 back to back blocks. If you can do more, great, but That's really all you need. If it’s good enough for Darwin, Dickins, Stephen King, and Henri Poincaré, it’s good enough for me. Seriously if you’re one of those brain dead millennials like me that read Outliers by Malcom Gladwell at an impressionable age and have been carrying 10k hours around in your head like a fucking commandment, know that 4 hours a day would enable you to master a skill in 7 years give or take. If you have to, move it somewhere else in the day because of jobs, parenting responsibilities, or because you have a hellacious commute to slog.

For the rest of your responsibilities throughout the day, divide these the same as possible. Batch context together in 2 hour blocks where possible or more. Avoid context switching and also group like tasks together. The one obvious exception to this is urgent communications. Not much you can do about that. Just make sure what’s presented as urgent is truly important. Never allow non-important things to assert their urgency.

Gap

I like to leave a 30 minute time block at the beginning of the day. This covers commutes, identifying urgent communications that are important and need to be handled immediately. This dovetails with the final block of the day, which will have a 30 minute break, which can be used for the same. If you’re commuting longer than that, first of all sorry, second, try to find a way to make that time more useful. Audiobooks or podcasts, one on one calls that are not super technical, and personal calls to friends are activities I like when I am forced to drive.

Block by category

Separating your time by what you are trying to accomplish, and then batching types of tasks within those buckets, is the cornerstone of effective time allocation. Blocking time by category helps change the mode you are thinking in, whether that needs to be executive, creative, or analytical. Further batching tasks together is beneficial because it counteracts that cost of context switching. I like to target specific percentages in general, and use that as a guide to plan my week, and work on each category for no less than one 2-hour block of time. This is how I divide my time currently, but you can create any categories and targets that make sense for you.

Creativity: working on a proposal to create an inside sales function that uses ChatGPT at my job. Experimenting with different prompts and contextual information to test responses for a simple demonstration. Crafting a business case including strategy and rough projections on performance. For this I allot 20% of my time, or roughly 6 x 2-hour blocks throughout the week.

Stability: doing the day to day function of my work - selling scientific equipment. For this I allot 40% of my time, or roughly 12 x 2-hour blocks throughout the week.

Growth: looking for courses and information on Prompt Engineering, and exploring other academic programs of study in Computer Science and Machine Learning, staying up to date with general news. For this I allot 20% of my time, or roughly 6 x 2-hour blocks throughout the week.

Adaptability: General reading, and working on writing a series of essays to start this blog, of which this is one. The point of this is to gain some fulfillment, but sometimes, I need to just step away and go touch grass. For this I allot 20% of my time, or roughly 6 x 2-hour blocks throughout the week.

Counting

When I start my week I sit down and try to roughly allocate my time for the week blocking off sections where I know I will be working around meetings. I try to schedule meetings for the afternoon, so that mornings are free for creative work and to rip through other solo tasks that don’t require much input from other people. But these are just guidelines. This plan often gets thrown out the window. At the end of each day and week, I try to create an approximate assessment of how I used my time. And I note it down, just so I can understand how my ideal time allocation is stacking up against reality at the end of each week.

“Only what gets measured gets managed” -- Peter Drucker

Some parting thoughts

Embrace 'no'. Not every request, invitation, opportunity, idea that comes your way deserves your time. And beginning with a ‘no’ mindset is a power-paradigm. Why should you do anything? Show up to work? Have a pet? Have a spouse? Why don’t we quit it with pushing the boulder up the hill already? We usually avoid asking ourselves questions like this, but often, for valuable endeavors you will have a gut reaction and know instinctively who loses if you quit your pursuit. Learning to decline gracefully but firmly is an invaluable skill in managing your time effectively. It also means killing your darlings, choosing not to do things that seem good so that you can prioritize the things that seem the best.8

It's also essential to invest in relationships that matter. Time spent with loved ones or on activities that rejuvenate you is not wasted. It's an investment in your well-being.

Don't drink coffee within 10 hours of bed or 1 hour of waking up. This is to avoid sleeplessness and crashing respectively. Consider switching to green tea. Try to sleep and wake at the same time everyday.

In navigating time management, I've borrowed and tried strategies to find a balance that works. It boils down to setting boundaries, prioritizing what truly matters, and allowing room for downtime. It’s essential to manage our time without losing sight of life’s unplanned joys. Remember: effective time management isn’t just about squeezing productivity out of every second, but making space for the moments that genuinely enrich our lives.

Change Echo Repeat

Dylan

P.S. I would love to hear from you! Leave a comment or shoot me a message, especially, if you have other suggestions on time managment or things that help you be more effecitive generally, or anything really. Let me know your thoughts.