Time Management: The Playbook

Here I will detail how I plan, organize and execute actionable tasks and develop ideas into reality while responsibly managing my allotment of time on Earth.

Manual Work

The bulk of my billable hours are spent programming. I thrive in isolation and love coding through the night. It’s a brilliant way to solve problems. Deep-diving into hard programming problems takes immense focus and discipline, without frivolous distraction. I’m constantly trying to build checks-and-balances systems to reduce distraction and increase productivity. Please, share your experiences with me! Let’s learn together.

In order to track my clients, work, notes and other outstanding tasks, I maintain a monolithic task list in emac’s org-mode, using David Allen’s Getting-Things-Done method. This isn’t a solution for everyone, and I’m not a productivity expert, but it does fit my needs well — learning new software and having the chance to extend it as I see fit is priceless. Besides, for productivity there isn’t much that can make you do something. It’s about picking the task you need to complete, and focusing your energies until it is complete, then repeating that process. Everything else is fluff.

That said, here’s a rough outline of how I keep my life in order.

Once a month I take about two hours to review my overall life goals, including financial budgetary projections/actual numbers, general progress and intuition about my next few weeks, and overall mission. I treat this as an informal, self-meeting in which it’s okay to move tasks around or flat-out delete side projects or low-priority tasks if I feel they weigh me down.

For me to put a task on my action list requires a stirring reaction of “Hell yeah,” else it drowns in non-existence. I simply can’t live with cruft.

Once a week, almost invariably on Sunday evenings, I spend an hour reviewing the past week’s progress and planning the next week’s task list. This Getting-Things-Done review cycle helps keep my focus between large, long-term projects and shorter-term contexts. Some other things I do on a weekly basis:

Housekeeping for business — do I need to follow up on any non-development related business tasks? This includes finding new business. More on that below.

Financial Bookkeeping — I aggregate and track every penny, and usually do a weekly finance session, which never takes more than an hour.

Laundry — My laundry is lightweight and anti-microbial but it requires regular washing. Life is mundane sometimes, too!

Family — It’s nice to call your family, if you can. They probably miss you.

Meal Day — I cook most of my meals by myself, because I thoroughly enjoy the process of cooking. It saves a lot of money, but once a week I make sure to treat myself to a special meal of sorts, either with friends or solo.

Each week, I review what business I have in the pipeline and where I need to fill gaps. Sometimes clients fall through, sometimes I get sick, etc., so I want to keep a steady stream of “good” projects. First step is defining good in my terms:

Willing to pay my rates.

Has a clear idea of what work needs to be done, in actionable terms

Understands the project and has at least one manager/stakeholder/decision maker who is savvy enough to discuss details with.

The project has to be somewhat interesting — I don’t often turn down work for this reason because I find every problem interesting, but as I grow I’m sure I’ll specialize and reach for more complex problems. For now I’m in the trenches.

About half of my work is repeat business from clientele who were happy with my performance, and the other half is new business. Of this new business, I’d say 75% is from either cold-emailing businesses I’d like to work with (small businesses in need of website uplifts) or applying for contracts on Upwork, Freelancer and reddit’s /r/forhire.

Once a day, I update my tasks for the rest of the week and adjust if I feel necessary. I keep a zero-inbox and reply instantly whenever possible. I honestly don’t do a ton of email, outside of clients. Currently I use gmail but am transitioning to a mutt-based email workflow. At the end of my day, I make sure to not leave any unfinished tasks on my list by moving them to when I’ll think I’ll be able to complete it. Over time I’ve gotten much better at estimate my time this way. A typical week’s task list looks like this:

Slightly Censored due to NDA

Many times a day, I’ll update and take notes in my GTD.org file. I always have this in an open emacs buffer on a workspace, and frequently clock-in and clock-out of tasks, adding notes and prioritizing.

My morning starts with a bit of light exercise, meditation and then a slow breakfast. I like to read stimulating medium-format content after eating, and then begin work on my tasks for the day. Last night’s review session left me with a crystal clear idea of what needs to be accomplished today, so I’ll ignore emails and knock out task #1. Then I usually take a break to catch up on news (quickly, five minutes or less to browse headlines and save any I deem crucial-to-consume with pinboard).

My best work happens in this mid-day block, and after a nice lunch I’ll get one more good work sesh in before I retire to leisure, nightlife, hiking, reading or music.

Software Help

Tasks are generated by a human (usually me) and reworded so as to be directly actionable. When they’re on my list I always try absolutely my hardest to finish it to the best of my ability.

I keep track of billable time using org-mode clock in and clock-out on a per-task basis. This file will live on, allowing quick text or tag-based searching. Agenda-mode is really cool.

I track my computer usage with RescueTime — I spend a lot of time on this laptop and need to make sure that time isn’t squandered.

I retroactively and manually track time I’ve spent in general terms (by the 1/2hr) on Google Calendar. here’s what a typical week looks like: