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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Time boxing is the best treatment I've found. A project may feel overwelming, but usually I can bring myself to bite off one tomato (25 minutes) of it. I can generally make a noticeable amount of progress in that time, and more importantly, clarify the next actions whose ambiguities have been leading me to procrastinate.

In one such session I actually completed a project I had put off for years

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Three years ago a friend and I were looking at different divisions of time -- in one of our Eastern Philosophy books there was a mention of splitting the day into 60 segments. We were puzzled. If there are 60 snaps in a day, how many minutes are in each snap? The answer is delightfully simple: 24 minutes per snap. (60 minutes an hour with 24 hours or 24 minutes a snap with 60 snaps). We have started using the 24-minute mark as a more flexible form of time measurement and of "see you soon" -- see you in a couple of snaps.

What book is this if you don't mind me asking?

Myriad Worlds (The Treasury of Knowledge). There is a portion on calculating days and the keyword is "clepsydra measure"

Same here. I tend to do work in super efficient batches. I've completed two months worth of small tasks in under an hour sometimes.

My default is to put everything off and do it in a batch right before (or after) it's due. But the past few years I've focused on doing batches way ahead of time. Less stressful and much more satisfying. Getting into Project Management certainly helped with that!

I use a similar trick, but focused on that last part where you search for ambiguities. I will spend 10 minutes just understanding the scope better, and not doing any work. It lets me start without actually starting, and then I'm usually much more comfortable getting to work once I've cleared some things up.

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