Plan, Assign, Reflect — The Escapement Journey

Have you ever wondered why we all have the same amount of time in a day and yet some people are able to achieve so much more than others? That’s the question that started me on this journey, from having an idea in my head to sharing Escapement with you now. For those who are impatient, Escapement is a tool that I have built to help me achieve my goals and you can check it out here. But for those who want to learn more about the story behind it, keep reading on.

The inspiration

I have always disliked the phrase “too busy”, it has become the prime excuse for all of us who have lost control of our time when we put off what we really should be doing. The world is moving faster and along with that development comes a wave of stimulants and distractions that we are not well trained to handle. Before we know it, we are spending hours watching videos online or scrolling through social media. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against any of these products, but I am against us losing control of time without even knowing it. I don’t believe it has to be that way, I envision a world where everyone is able to decide how they want to spend their time, whether it is working 15 hours a day or sitting at home and binge watching a show. I envision a world where not a single second is wasted. I believe that if we can all manage our time better, our society as a whole will be able to achieve so much more and we will be living a much richer life.

Why the name?

For those who are wondering about the name, it is a reference to a mechanical watch component. The escapement turns the energy from the winded spring into time by regulating how much energy is released inside the watch. I hope Escapement can be the tool that will help you direct your potential energy into achieving your goals.

How I came up with this idea

Time management is not a new idea and many people have published a lot of useful information on this subject. Out of all the books I have read, I personally was inspired the most by these and you should really check them out.

• Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Finish — Give yourself the gift of done by Jon Acuff

After learning some techniques from these books, I wanted to start tracking my time to have a baseline understanding of how I am spending it. But soon I ran into my first problem, it is actually quite hard to keep track of what I am doing, partly because I get distracted and switch tasks or lose track of where I am, but mainly because time tracking is just not a very natural thing to do. Whether it is by writing it down on paper, logging it in a calendar, or even tracking it with a fancy gadget like Zeio.

I persisted and eventually started to be able to track where I was spending my time, but then came the second problem. I was not able to get much useful information out of what I had tracked. There wasn’t much point flipping through my time tracking notebook or scrolling through my filled calendar, since the information was not aggregated. And for the tracking app, it’s cool to know that I spent 54% of my time doing A and 26% doing B, but what now? I think there are actually two parts to this problem, the first being that we don’t know what we want to spend our time on and the second is that we are not able to learn from what we have done.

With that understanding, I knew I needed to start a step before we spend our time and extend a step after we spent it. I wanted a solution that is beyond just tracking time, hence the idea of Escapement was born. It would start by helping me plan what I needed to do, then help me find time to do it and also help me reflect on how I did it. I wanted to create a feedback loop for myself so that I could learn and improve.

The Escapement Principles

Before we get to the product itself, I want to share some of the principles behind it. These are principles that I live by and I hope they will provide some context around the product.

It is about making decisions

Before time can be spent meaningfully, we need to decide on how we want to spend it. While Escapement is a time management tool, it is one that encourages you to make decisions on your personal priorities and it helps you get things done.

It is more than a work tool

While I know there are benefits for using a tool like this at work, I hope people will use Escapement for different aspects of their life outside of work. The reason is that we are implicitly or explicitly trading off time between work and personal life and knowing that balance is important.

It is about being in control and feeling comfortable spending your time however you want

The tool is not there to help you do more work, it is there to help you take control of your time. I believe personal time is as much if not more important than work time and we often feel guilty when we take time off for ourselves. Escapement is here to help you plan and balance different aspects of your life.

It is about being honest with yourself

Escapement analyses your actions objectively and shows you how you have been spending your time. But at the end of the day, you need to be honest with yourself so that you can learn and improve. The insights and reports are there to help you understand whether you are achieving what you set out to achieve.

Escapement Features

Now let’s have a look at how Escapement works. This is a high level overview of the product and if you want to learn more you can have a look at the actual product here.

The process

Escapement operates on a three steps process — plan, assign and reflect, and together they form a feedback loop that is aimed to help you get better at achieving your goals.

Plan

Many of us have goals that are too big to know where to start. Planning helps us bring the future into the present so we can break down the steps we need to take to get there. While I know it’s impossible to come up with a good plan, the act of planning itself is often the key to success. By setting aside the time to think through how we can achieve our goals, we are much more likely to be able to do so.

Escapement currently offers two main planning features, Task Planning for once-off activities and Habit Planning for recurring activities. Task Planning provides a to-do list for you to capture all the tasks that you need to do. You only have a single list because there is only a single you and a single instance of time. By putting different tasks in a single place, you need to choose and prioritize between different aspects of your life. You will provide a time estimate for each task so it can help you get better at estimation. Each task is sized based on the time estimate so you can visualize that not all tasks are the same and plan accordingly. Habit Planning focuses on keeping track of your habits. When you create a habit, it will automatically block out time in the calendar and it also keeps count of your streak as you start to build up that habit.

Assign

Once you have planned what you need to do, it is time to execute. Research shows that simply by setting a time and place, we are much more likely to follow through with what we planned to do. This is known as implementation intention and the assign step is inspired by this theory.

Normally when it comes to finding time to do things, we use a calendar, but that doesn’t really tell us our priorities. There are far too many weeks where we had a filled calendar but we didn’t really work on what’s important, so the interface is designed to help you solve that problem.

In assign mode, you can see your top five prioritised tasks placed side by side to your calendar and they are sized according to your time estimate. By dragging and dropping your tasks into the calendar, you are setting an implementation intention for yourself and setting yourself up for success. In order to make sure you have all your events in one place, Escapement currently supports Google calendar integration so you can plan around your other commitments. The calendar is also used as a time tracker and you can adjust the calendar events to reflect the actual time you spent and the results will be analysed in the next step.

Reflect

The final and most important step of the process is reflecting on our actions. After diligently planning and executing, it’s time to see what insights you can learn. I believe this is an area where we can actually get a lot of value from and there are two types of feedback that you can get from Escapement.

A number of metrics and visualisations are shown on the reflect page where each of them are designed to help you understand certain aspects of your productivity. Some might help you understand how far ahead you usually plan, how consistent you are working from week to week or when your most productive time and day is. There is no right or wrong here and the insights are designed to help you understand your actions and assess whether you want to make any changes accordingly.

The other feedback mechanism is integrated into the earlier steps of the process. For example, if you have been consistently underestimating the time you need to finish your tasks, next time when you create a new task, it will remind you to allocate more time. This small feedback is there to guide you by providing timely and relevant information.

What’s next

Release

There are still many more improvements that I would like to make but as Reid Hoffman said, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” So I am shipping this and hoping to find my early adopters and get some feedback. While it is far from perfect, it has helped me keep track of my time and enabled me to turn Escapement from an idea to an MVP. If you want to start managing your time and priorities, please check out the product and give it a try. It is also now launched on Product Hunt if you want to check it out.

New Features

While I have a lot of ideas that I want to add to Escapement, I would like to get some feedback on the MVP before I prioritize what to add. But just to give you a sneak peak, here are some ideas on the backlog

• Prioritization helper → Inspired by the Eisenhower Matrix, the prioritization tool will enable you to visually map out the importance v. urgency of their tasks and it will automatically help you rearrange your tasks so you can focus on getting things done.
• Project & Goals → It’s not always easy to be able to come up with tasks directly, so projects and goals will enable you to start from top down and help you break down your ambitious goals into actionable tasks.
• Intelligent feedback → By adding more intelligent feedback, you can get the most value out of using the product. Recommendations such as when you should work on this task and smart rescheduling when your plan changes will help you get on top of your schedule.
• Integration → Extend integration to other calendar products so you can have all your events in a single place when you are planning your day. There is also potential to integrate with products like Slack, so you can reap the benefits of Escapement with the tools that you are already using.
• Reminder → It’s hard to keep your daily schedule memorized, so a timely push notification will help you stay on track.

As you can see, there is still plenty of work to do but if you have any ideas that you think would be valuable, please reach out to me! I would love to hear from you.

For those who are still with me

If you are still reading this, thank you so much for reading about my journey. It has been a fun and exciting one. I hope this is only the start of Escapement and more importantly the start of a movement where we can be in control of our time and priorities. It’s not an easy thing to do and we will fail more often than not. But that’s no excuse for not trying because I believe we are capable to do so much more than we think and we have a better chance if we can take control of our time.

I would love to meet other people who are passionate about this topic, so feel free to contact me.

Once again, thank you for sticking with me and I hope you enjoy Escapement.