Time-boxing procrastinator
Procrastination is a killer. It can help you waste time, and not get to the end goal of what ever project, assignments etc that you are working on ( or rather supposed to work towards ). For me, from time to time I would find a good excuse to procrastinate. Before we welcomed our daughter exactly 1 year ago today, my excuse was that I was tired of work. I used to spend a fair amount of my personal time to support any ad-hoc requirements from my day job. But with recent months, I am using the excuse that I need to spend all my available time with both my kids. Its hard to make sure that you pay enough attention to both of them and make sure they are treated equally.
The reason I started writing this article is after my move to Sydney for my new job; within the first month I had this super cool app idea which I wanted to work on. The idea is super simple. The technical bits are not very complicated. Although I needed to expose my self to a few new tools to get it done on a new platform, it should have been a piece of cake. But, its almost 7 months since I started and I only have about 40% code complete.
On top of all that I turned 30. I started to think that I am getting a bit old for the rat race and have turned into a grumpy old programmer, who doesn’t really want to code 24/7. Well most of it is true. I don’t want to code 24/7 now even if I had the energy. With all these mixed set of emotions, unhealthy diet and a family pac. I was almost at the verge of giving up.
In the mids of all this work happens. I get to code and stay up-to date with tech for a significant amount of time for a day. Like most tech companies we embrace agile development, the good thing with agile development is the retro where we do a no bullshit discussion on what went wrong and how to improve. In a few of these discussion I found the topic of time boxing come up several times. And it made sense in a technical view point. I never thought of looking at the topic in a much broader perspective. But, a few weeks ago I underwent a internal training session that discussed time management. It was focused on personal time management. That made the discussions far more relevant, than most generic templated trainings. Out of all the goodness from the training, I found using time-boxing to be helpful to get away with procrastination.
How so you might think ? Well, its pretty straight forward. I take a list of the tasks that I have in hand that I never get to. For an example :
- Work on Side Project A
- Review GitHub PR’s for side Project B
- Review GitHub issues for side Project C
The turn off for most of these were giving a personal deadline. I used to try leaving a note on a todo list app to complete Project A by this date xx/xx/xxxx but this makes it too overwhelming. Instead of that I opted to allocate a specific amount of time for a day to work on each side project. So with this method I would ideally time-box 30min to 1 hour on each project alternating days.
So for an example , every day from 10:30pm 11:30pm I would work on side projects. Each weak I would decide on which project to work for how many days :
- Project A → Mon , Tue, Fri
- Project B → Wed
- Project C → Thu
This, approach works great for those projects that have been on your list but you never seem to find time to work on. This worked for me so far, and thats what made me write this article. I know how procrastinating can get to you. But knowing how to use it for your advantage or at least trying to work around it is the best we can do. Apart from watching funny cat videos on youtube :D
