Time-blocking

I recently stumbled upon an idea for structuring a work-day: time-blocking. The idea has been around for a while, but I accidentally stumbled upon it while looking for a calendar/time-planner. The main proponent of time-blocking is Cal Newport, and although I have been hesistant to read his book, due to its popularity with the self-improvement community, his time-block calendar has been a game changer.

The idea behind time-blocking is very simple - the building unit of a work-day is not a task, but a 30-minute time interval. Therefore, planning for a day should be approached as time-deligation, not task-deligation. In practice, time-blocking works by starting from a graph of all 30-minute intervals in a max-10-hour work-day, and dedicating each block to a specific task. Cal Newport explains the exact implementation in a 10-minute video on his website

Using this approach in the past four weeks has done two things for me. First, it has kept me honest about my daily work. Writing down a plan for the day keeps me responsible to execute, and this has improved my focus. The consequence: reduced wandering about what task to complete, and meandering into tangential exploration. Second, I have been able to intentionally dedicate time for problem-solving each week, a challenge I wanted to solve and I discussed in a previous blog-post. I am happy that I have been able to dedicate 10 hours of problem solving in the past 4 weeks.

Time-blocking also gives me historical data on what I’ve done, and how long each task took. This data will help me improve my time estimation and planning, skills that I urgently need to work on.

Long-term memory

Now that I have some structure for work-days, my next aim is to find a way to retain information from the different activities I do (mostly for learning new concepts). I am currently exploring mind-mapping, something I have tried previously, but never got around to doing seriously; and Anki flash-cards for better memory-rentention. While both of these do not improve my raw thinking ability, I believe they are important to train my memory, and to help with my work in different domains. I believe training my memory to hold disparate information can tremendoulsy help with the constant context-switching. I should importantly note that I do not believe this will improve the depth of my understanding of physics, my thinking or problem-solving abilities, it only helps with keeping facts/techniques in my memory. On a more personal level, memorization has been something I have ignored/averted - I firmly believe that raw thinking and creativity always outperform memorization, but the truth is somewhere in between. Thus, I am trying to adjust my approach.

References

[1] Anki - Powerful, Intelligent Flashcards, https://apps.ankiweb.net/.
[2] Cal Newport, https://www.timeblockplanner.com/.
[3] Home - Freeplane Documentation, https://docs.freeplane.org/home.html.