On Time Management

Prasanna Gautam
Jul 21, 2017 · 8 min read

(I wrote this — had it reviewed and kind of sat on it for almost a month, until last week I realized I was feeling burnt out again. These aren’t sure shot things and one time tasks, you have to constantly re-evaluate what you’re doing)

I have struggled with this topic for a long time, and it wasn’t until I joined my first startup almost 1.5 years ago, that I realized I needed to learn to manage my time or I’ll burn out. Until then, I had been able to keep up despite my horrible habits of starting work late, pulling all-nighter to get things done more frequently than I care to admit. I decided I needed to balance my work goals with family, fitness and relationship goals. These are some of the things that have helped me get better.

Understanding myself

I have often been described as a “novelty seeker.” I’ll seek to learn new things — do stuff in just a slightly different way, or take a different road home. Change drives me, and the desire to modify and optimize things are important to me.

Growing up, I knew I was good at mathematics but other than gaming and occasional programs it wasn’t anything special. The moment I realized I liked the programming aspect more than gaming was when I got my hands on Quake 3’s source code and started playing with the source and seeing what I could do. I still poke around big codebases and see how they’re put together.

There’s a quote in Nepalese: “If you do too much, even sugar gets bitter;” this comes in the form of a burnout. You want to pace yourself so what you enjoy still remains enjoyable.

I like the idea of Flow. Often finding that state of “flow” in an editor solving a particularly tough problem is relaxing, even after a 12-hour workday for me. If this isn’t you, don’t worry, it’s fine. You just have to find something that works for you.

Finding your priorities

In many ways, everything I do, I do to get in a state of “flow.” Whether it’s playing a musical instrument, or riding a bike. I’m always curious how someone else copes with stress and staying productive.

Mine are in order:

  • Family
  • Fitness
  • Friends
  • Professional Development
  • Having Fun while doing all these

Often they’re not exclusive, you can mix say professional development with Fitness by watching a video from latest conference while you’re on treadmill, or listening to new podcast on your way to a hike. If I am not talking with my fellow hiking friend, I sometimes put an audiobook or a podcast during the hike too. Also, if your friends love biking, maybe go on a bike ride together, or dance the night away, you’ll bond and maybe get some cardio with the dance ;).

These ideas aren’t new — or unique I have been influenced by books like “Drive: The Surprising Truth about what motivates us”, Matt Might’s writing on “Hacking Strength” and The Art of Manliness and many others. In particular:

Focus on Big Rocks

Define your Core Values

Finding Novelty: Reading Goals

I make a point to learn a new skill every year, and reading a lot. Every year since 2013, I have made a goal to read 26 books (I classify them as a decent size Young Adult novel-size books), and then I made a metric out of them. One of things I’ve found is that if you don’t measure it, you don’t improve. Period. I make a “Challenge” on Goodreads to read a certain number of books. These can be audiobooks or physical books. And when I’m done, I write a short review and move on. It gives me a good context when I re-read a good book what I was thinking at the time.

Finding Novelty/Fitness: Hikes

I hike a lot, and love it. I like the disconnected-ness of it. In our current always-interconnected, online on Slack for work culture, it’s good to have outlets to feel truly disconnected and one with nature. One of the greatest things about being in the Bay Area is that you have so many great places in accessible distance to walk around, so many great trails. You can find a lot of new routes, places with excellent foods, and great views. Also, your buddies following you on Instagram will be a little jealous at how much you can hike. :P

This has significantly improved both my physical and mental well being. I used to have sporadic knee pain and allergies before I started hiking frequently — i.e., before I moved to Bay Area. After a few months of having to take allergy meds every single time I went outside, I barely use any these days, and no knee pain.

This was after an excellent 12 mile hike to the summit of Haleakala to see the sunset!

Reduce your commute time & put that into your fitness goals

I have two rules with commute

  • live against traffic to work
  • if you can, avoid it entirely

When I started working at Mist Systems in Cupertino, I used to live in Pacifica which takes about 45 minutes to commute to Cupertino. After about a month, I found that I was significantly unhappier.

Scenic, but a long drive….

Unlike when I worked at SparX in San Mateo, which was 20 minutes against-traffic ride at most, and reasonable hours (ok, 11-7pm followed by 10pm-1am might not be reasonable to you, it seems to be for me), and I was absolutely not enjoying the view I had.

So, I broke the lease, found a really cheap room in Mountain View, reduced the commute time. I broke even on the money spent on breaking the lease in about 3 months. In the meantime, I just decided to put the 1.5 hours I saved into getting my workout goals. It was something I had struggled for a long time. I made a point to not even take my phone into the gym for nearly 4 months in that time, to simulate the time I wouldn’t have been able to respond while driving anyway.

80% reduction on my “commute-to-work” KPI :)

Consequently — I was a lot happier, and a lot more productive. Even though, in theory I was no longer living a fancy awesome place with a view to the beach, I was meeting my fitness and professional goals.

Getting to state of Flow

Often the first part of problem is “getting started,” to which I present the following anecdotes from one of the most prolific writers — Stephen King. His suggestion was to just start writing, at one point you get into it and start enjoying it. Just allocate some time and do it.

To do that, I use an app called PomoTodo: that utilizes pomodoro technique. There are many articles on the web about what it means, to me it is like a little runway that a plane needs to take off. An airplane doesn’t just take off, it needs momentum, and by focusing all my attention on a problem or work for a few 25-minute, focused session where I do “small-win” tasks, I get to the point where I begin enjoying it. At some point even making pomodoro becomes a chore and I stop if I’m already in state of flow. Also breaking into 25 minutes lets you take breaks, look around, and relax.

Being Honest and Communicate

After end of a particularly nasty relationship, I decided to reflect what I can improve in myself. I am always trying to do too many things — whether at work, in personal life. And often when I set these high expectations for myself, I’d fail and I’d tell white lies. For instance, a loved one asks you why you forgot their birthday.

This is somewhat contrived but the example is same. It may not have been totally false, but it’s not accurate either. I believe that empathy is like any other skill, you can learn it over time, more you communicate and try to read people, you get better at it. And, foundations of any successful relationship is communication. There’s a right amount of it, but it’s upto you to figure out.

Now, I always make a point to respect my friends’, family’s time and if I cannot, I communicate in advance why I can’t. You wont be able to get everything you want but losing friends because they think you’re a flaky bastard is not a good way to go about life.

Sharpening my professional tools

I have always done this in one way or other but I try to allocate a significant amount of time reviewing and improving the tools I use for work. Whether it’s my code editor (I use a combination of Emacs, IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code) or my scripts and tools. I share them on github so that they’re helpful to others. This blog is also another attempt at it. In my experience, more you share knowledge, more it grows and you can get

I share my dotfiles, emacs setup and even though I don’t use vim regularly anymore, people seem to find my vim-config useful.

Even though I have switched to Emacs now, I still type vim to get to it, and occassionally drop into evil-mode. So it’s hardly surprising people still find my vim-config useful.

Give yourself a break

You have to give yourself a pass every once in a while. You’re just human. Sometimes you’ll feel lazy or bored and will binge entire season of Archer in one night instead of working. It’s okay, try to figure out why you did that and learn. In Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal presents the studies that show that if you beat yourself up too much on missing willpower goals, you will actually do it more, and beat yourself up even more, resulting in an vicious cycle of depression. I recommend her entertaining talk at Google for a good introduction to the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BXuZL1HAg

Take it easy every once in a while, kick back, and relax. You’ll be re-energized and come back with force.

These are just what I could think of today, these by no means are exhaustive. Please share your productivity tricks and ideas on how I can improve.

Thanks a lot to Sandip Agrawal and Prajjwol Gautam for reviewing the early drafts.

)

Thanks to Sandip Agrawal

Prasanna Gautam

Written by

I hack, therefore I am

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