Author: Chris Tingom

Nooka Watches

Just had lunch with Sunny Thaper and noticed he had a cool looking watch. Turns out it’s a Nooka watch. He has the one pictured below (only in white). They do some neat stuff with visualizations of time… as you can see in this picture. Each row represents 30 minutes of the day.

95% effort and 5% talent

Ultimately, my whole approach to what I do is 95% effort and 5% talent. I really see it as a sport. You probably won’t become a tennis player if you don’t stand on the court for six hours a day and whack balls over the net. And if you do that, you have to be incredibly untalented for it not to work. But I think it’s tempting to think as a creative professional, you sit there and you’re creative. So much of it is just doing it everyday for hours.

— Christoph Niemann: Short Deadlines Make You Think Straight

Indulgence

Saw this gem from Paul Graham today and had to share:

A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I’d feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I’d start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.

And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

Getting things done when you have kids

Link: Two Kids, In Two Years: Best Time Management Strategy Ever

Just read this tip on how to get things done when you have children:

I would spend lots of time thinking, and making notes randomly whenever I could. Then when I could sit down and do some work, I would have a plan. Another aspect that always helped, is that I was never able to get the list done. Which meant always knew what I was going to start on next.

Using your memory to track time is dumb

Quick! Think about what you were eating for lunch a week ago on Monday. I bet you can’t remember. That’s my point. Time tracking after-the-fact is dumb and totally inaccurate.

At best, you’ll be able to guess about the chunks of time, but never the detail. You’ll forget all of the little things you did, and you’ll be forced to fudge the numbers.

Use your brain, use a stopwatch.

Photo on Flickr by conorwithonen (CC BY 2.0)