Quantization of Time

I’ve been thinking about time in the wrong way for a lot of my life. I used to block my day in hour by hour chunks. 2 hours gone studying here, another hour devoted to cleaning my room, another hour to make lunch, you get the picture. The trouble with this is that there are only so many of such chunks in a typical day. As a result, after a long day of classes, I’d get home around 5 pm and be surprised when I only managed to get a few tasks finished. The problem wasn’t that I was sluggish or lazy, but rather my method of time allocation was flawed.

There are a couple of principles which cause this time-based allocation strategy to fail:

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time given to it.
2. Pareto Principle: 80% of the results are achieved in 20% of the time.

This is why many of the traditional “study” tools such as the Pomodoro technique, kitchen timer, or app “Forest” fail. True, they lock you down to a particular task for a set amount of time, but they optimize for the wrong goal. They cause you to directly link your units of time with units of result. This unnecessarily limits your results (since you only have so many units of time in a given day, in my case I had about 5, hour-long, chunks free).

A much better “study” or “work” plan is simply to spend the upfront cost clearly delineating the tasks which need to be done.

• Solve 5 problems involving Bayes Theorem instead of saying study Bayes Theorem for an hour
• Add server side caching to all backend routes instead of saying work on my app backend for an hour.

You get the idea, be specific with your tasks and your time can be much better allocated. Maybe solving 5 problems takes only 20 minutes instead of an hour? I have the freedom to move on to my next task. This simple change from an hour-based mindset to a results-based mindset has really helped me squeeze more into a packed day.