Ways to manage your time better | Hacker News Reader

Ways to manage your time better

nature.com

113 pointslordqwerty32 comments

I'll never forget the time shortly after switching into industry from a purely laboratory workplace, that I had my first encounter with a professional project manager.

I got so pissed off that some un-introduced remote person on a conference call was try to tease out what all my "tasks" where, when they would be done and in what order (as well as when everyone else's would be done). Thus began my career-long love/hate relationship with project management (mostly hate).

While I am sure that scientists and academics can do well with general-purpose time-management skills, I think that industry could perhaps have more to gain by picking up some tips from how scientists work (and ease-off on the obsession with project management).

Depends on the quality and style of the PM, but a good one is worth their wait in gold. By coordinating the meetings, managing the dates, and keeping everyone accountable, it takes those burdens off other team members, letting them focus on the work.

I hate to say it, but the litmus tests seems to be, "Do they have a PMP?"

If the answer is yes, run away fast, you're in danger of being crushed under a mountain of paperwork.

If the answer is no, I guess the answer isn't so clear cut, but I have definitely worked with ones who are worth more than their weight in gold.

The good ones, in an organization with any sense at all, keep you from having to answer "when will it be done" and "why isn't it done yet" questions from non-team-members, which is wonderful. Those questions will come up, and if ICs are answering them to anyone outside their own team then your (the general "your") process likely sucks and is slowing everything down and making everyone miserable.

Yeah, I was being somewhat facetious. There certainly is a difference in the way that scientists and people in industry work. I think that folks that have crossed over from Science to industry experience a level of culture shock regarding the way work is done.

They can both learn from each other, but having been in industry for a while, I feel like in too many places there's a soul crushing amount of project-management busy work. And I've heard my friends in academia complain about a lack of "project management" leading to a nightmarish amount of loose-ends and things never actually being "finished".

weight...

Though maybe "wait" is appropriate for a thread on time management?

From my interactions with lab scientists, it seems the best way to get work out of them was to provide money and coffee. They were so self-motivated you practically had to drag them out of the place

The biggest time saver for scientists would be a funding process that does not involved writing voluminous proposals with key metrics and other make work information that keeps bureaucrats happily well-fed and well-paid.

I'm not saying there is no need for some way of making sure the money is spent effectively but the grant proposal process is largely a sham and a charade that needs radical overhaul.

Saved you a click

>Make a plan

>Beware of distractions

>Learn to say ‘no’

>Give yourself a break

>Don’t try to chase every great idea

>A plan can help in a crisis

Yes, but there is more helpful detail in the article. Specifically taking five minutes each morning to block out my calendar for specific tasks is something that has greatly improved my working days

What I do for myself is I have a hard computer logoff time (11 PM), but I can work with paper / read books, so I work on the paper planner after that.

> Take a long, hard look at your relationship with e-mail and social media. Although they are vital to everyday communication, they can claim much more attention than they deserve. Consider shutting them off completely as you work on a task that requires your full attention.

For me this strikes at the heart of a fundamental problem: on one hand we all want to maximize our attention span. On the other hand, the task of regulating and disciplining our use of social media is placed squarely on our own shoulders, which can be difficult because these platforms are intentionally addicting.

I developed Pony—email that sends and receives once a day—to give people a non-distracting place to communicate. The critical thing is that you don't have to regulate or discipline yourself. There's nothing to "turn off."

I've been using it for several months, and it's pretty funny: I still find myself checking my Inbox for something new even though I know that nothing new will come until tomorrow. The addictive power of social media is that strong and it keeps us from doing what’s important.

[0]: https://www.pony.gg

I really want a client like that for HN, subreddits and my twitter feed, ideally with a feedback mechanism that can be used to rank the content based on my interests and filter out all of the other crap.

Me too. It seems like instantaneity does not actually, by default improve everything. Instantaneity was one of the biggest, most novel things about the Internet/digital communication so it was adopted by default in all applications. But now I think it must be rethought.

RSS-to-email once a week, maybe with some other kind of filter (quality, popularity, keywords) in the middle for sites with too much noise (HN qualifies, lots of stories in a week). I think there are a couple sites that do that for HN, but aggregating everything would probably be a DIY job.

That’s awesome. Just signed up.

Wonder if the answer should be technical. It feels like more a self controlled issue. Like I keep refreshing my emails for no real reasons. But if I block myself to this feed, I will just switch to another feed. Eg HN or Reddit.

Thank you! Please keep in touch and let me know what you think. I've found that using Pony is both strangely underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time... would love to hear other people's experiences.

> Wonder if the answer should be technical. It feels like more a self controlled issue.

That's exactly why I built Pony: to remove the self control factor. If the whole point of technology is to make us better, than why should we have to improve ourself (ie. improve our discipline, self control) just to use technology?

> But if I block myself to this feed, I will just switch to another feed. Eg HN or Reddit.

That's something I've experienced myself. For that I sometimes edit my hosts file to block services, or DNS at the router level. Of course that's kind of ridiculous...

That’s a good point. Not sure if I have an answer. The thing is there is a real - small but real - value of checking your emails or refreshing your feeds every 1h. Like if there is some kind of urgency or you’ll be missing out on something important. The added stress is not worth it though and it’s where I join you.

Yeah, I agree. I am starting with one delivery per day because that's simple and easy to communicate. But really I'd like to gather feedback and add delivery options. A delivery style I would enjoy, for example, is actually linking the time to sunrise/midday/sunset based on user location. Also, I think it would be nice to let users choose one or more of the delivery times, instead of just one. And once an hour, like you said, might work well for people.

This is what study-strategies youtuber Thomas Frank calls the "any value" mindset and as you point out, it fails to count the opportunity cost which it imposes.

Can you share a link? Can’t find anything on YouTube.

You are right that this doesn't stop you from going on other feeds. If you google for "SelfControl.app", "ColdTurkey", or "Freedom.app", you will find tools which help you block those other feeds. Things like this are a crutch: a tool we use to get around in the world and solve problems despite the fact that our bodies are imperfect.

I have a disability where I find it hard to read text which is far away. Its the sort of thing that could be a real problem in my life. However, I've got a tool I've been using since age 8 to make that much, much easier to deal with. Would it be better if I wasn't dependent on this piece of technology? sure. But I don't live in a perfect world and refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you have a similar condition and find to focus long-distance, I encourage you to use my solution. You can find it by googling "inexpensive eyeglasses".

I started only looking at slack after lunch. I get so much done in the morning I actually have time to fuck around on slack.

When I worked in academic research one of the biggest wastes of time was that the Professor in charge of the lab never turned up to meetings on time (30 mins late being typical) - which wouldn't have been too bad except he constantly bragged about his time management skills. I eventually realised he meant he never wasted any of his time but happily made 15 of us sit around a meeting room for ages.... Which is fair enough I guess (he was in charge) but did nothing for morale.

If you're his subordinates though, wasting all of your time surely ends up costing him more productivity in the end.

Very intelligent people (who this Prof definitely was) can sometimes also be rather stupid at times.

The way I think of time management now inspired by a book I've never read [0]. I read the review for the Power of Less on the Personal MBA website, "Leo Babauta masterfully teaches the fine art of focusing on the essential and eliminating the superfluous." I thought to myself what I really cared about and what I didn't. My list of things to do everyday was becoming unmanageable.

What I do now is consider my main goal at the moment. What is the thing that if I didn't try my best to accomplish it I would have serious regrets? In my case it's completing my computer science education. Then I consider what would not be worth sacrificing in order to accomplish this goal. In my case it's things like becoming unhealthy and being a slob.

In the end I've settled on a system where I devote my morning to maintaining these things I can't give up and I devote my evenings to my main goal. I spend an hour or so exercising and make sure to tidy up before work. Once I get home I can devote my full energy to the task at hand.

Children are not recommended for this scenario.

[0] https://personalmba.com/review/power-of-less/

In university I studied engineering/science, but when I transitioned into the working world, I transitioned into project management. To me this article is somewhat click-bait promising to "just do these # of things..."

I guess it provides helpful tips or a more simplistic way to begin to manage your time better if that is something you are struggling with and feel overwhelmed with how to even start to improve it. But I strongly feel the thing that makes me a great project manager is that you know how much rigor is appropriate for a given project so you know just how much to spend time planning and how much you need to focus on execution.

And "Beware of Distractions" is a huge understatement. I think this area deserved a little more because, IMO, you shouldn't just be aware, you need to actively manage this. You need to set specific time aside to look at your email. You need to put your phone down and not surf the web at random times. You need to be deliberate with your time, especially if you have a lot to get done. This is where having a list of "tasks" or things you want to accomplish in a specified amount of time can be helpful, because you can prioritize getting through that before you go to your emails, texts, etc.

I will recommend Leonard Adleman interview where he gives some answers about how to choose the problem to work with: http://teacher.scu.edu.cn/ftp_teacher0/chjtang/teach/adleman...

step 1: read articles on how to manage your time better on Hacker News

step 2: read the rest of the articles on Hacker News, then frantically try to get all your work done in whatever time you have left.

step 0.5: research which sites have the best articles on how to manage your time, evaluate the history of Hacker News, search Quora for opposing opinions on its voting model to avoid bias, skip work, write a language-independent pattern analysis framework to determine whether /pol/ is leaking into your site, lose your job, put your framework up on Github and spam HN for advice, get tons of comments on how great your idea is, create a Patreon so you can eat, and by the end of the month determine that the best option for articles on how to manage your time is Hacker News.

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