i actively develop time management techniques

the best experience i've ever had was with meeting a reading deadline

i needed to read through a final draft of a book i was writing with friends before the publication date

i had read the book a thousand times but in pieces

so it was important for me to read it through cover to cover before it was published

i knew when the deadline was and was putting it off until three days before the day and i still had 130 pages to read and edit

i decided to dedicate a day to finishing it

130 pages, 1 day.. i could easily pull off 10 pages per hour and effectively work from 9am, to 10pm

10 pages per hour seems silly but it really is a mechanism to subvert what i call my reward response

put in the time to read 10 pages at the start of any hour and the rest of the hour is mine to do whatever i want to

stretch, workout, run, eat, context switch, information dope

sometimes those 10 pages would take 5 minutes, woot! 55 minutes to work on some other project

sometimes i would be so distracted that those 10 pages could take 40 minutes, so i'd make myself some tea and stare out a window for 10 minutes before the next hour

reading simplifies this model because you can quickly gauge how many hours you want to work, how much reading you have to do, and roughly how fast you can read

it's a bit different for other endeavors

for instance, 10 lines of code can take 2 seconds or 2 years

so instead of hard hour breaks i'll work until i finish a definitive partition of a larger project and wherever i lie in the current hour chunk determines the length of the reward, to be limited by the start of the next hour

same game different rules