You should randomise your workflow, and here’s why
I’m one of those people constantly looking for the best way to get stuff done. Planning, Pomodoro, To-Do lists, Scheduling…you name it, I’ve probably tried it out. All in the grand quest to find that perfect flow of how to get the most done in the least amount of time. I kept doing this over and over, and nothing quite worked the way I wanted it to. My biggest issue was with the amount of time spent doing the planning. Planning the number of chapters or topics, how important they are, how long will it take, and so on.
Then I came across this book called Algorithms To Live By, written by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I highly recommend this book to people looking for ways to optimise everyday things for efficiency. In this instance, I latched onto what they mentioned about how computers presented with a large number of tasks simply skip the scheduling and start randomly picking things for execution. The reason for this is simple. Sometimes scheduling takes longer than the tasks themselves, and in such cases the best approach is to just go about it randomly because the machine will still get the tasks done faster than if it had scheduled the tasks by priority and execution time. This time difference is especially noticeable if the tasks to be executed are constantly changing.
As a college student, I have to balance my studies, extra activities that I’m doing and my work on social media. Sometimes it becomes overwhelming, and I have a bias towards simply practising code and writing articles or blogs as opposed to studying. My nerves were slowly getting fried trying to balance all of these things while still keeping my personal biases out of it, and the best way to solve this problem for me was to simply not schedule, at least not on a long term basis.
The approach I used for this was simple. I compiled a list of everything I have to study or do, and assigned a score of priority to each of them on a scale of 5. I then wrote a Python program that does only one thing; give me a random list of subjects to study on that day, the list being generated based on the score of priority.
Each day my program tells me what to study without me having to fret over what to do next. It is like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. Figuring out what to study was easily the most stressful part of the studying process for me, and getting my computer to do the heavy lifting for me has made things much, much easier. If you haven’t tried this method out yet I recommend that you give it a shot.
The code I used to implement this is posted on my GitHub page.
