Last Week's Planning Postmortem
I planned out my work this last week. As in, across all five weekdays, rather than just one day at a time. How did it go?
Good
Overall: really great! I think I got a lot more done, especially early to mid-week, and was happier for it. Also, bigger tasks (like presenting and work due by meetups) got done in time.
- gym all 3x
- daily leetcode all 5x
- published daily log all 5x
- presented (2x!)
- paired
- finished all sidequests
- took some ML re-edu steps
- attended lots of recurse stuff: talks, parties
Also, I liked the format of just doing it in a single GitHub issue. It’s easy to check stuff off, easy to move stuff, easy to deprecate stuff, and I have the confidence I’ll close it and wipe the state clean after the week.
To improve
Fell off later in week when too much stuff piled up, got busier, and I stopped having any serious hour↔task consideration for a given day. Stuff I consistently missed:
- inboxes
- zulip (reading others’ checkins and replying)
- blog post work
- ML study
One-offs I missed:
- scheduling a BBG time
- RL book
Main takeaways:
-
My most clutch / productive / perfect days were when I allocated tasks to time blocks. This clearly seems like the right answer.
- Tu/Thu 8-9am may be good proper blog post time
- ML study can happen daily in the 9-10 and 11-12 blocks (though breakfast and commuting will eat some of it)
-
My sleep also suffered later in the week as I stayed up a bit too late. (And today, Saturday. Really can’t easily sleep in any more.) I think an evening alarm could help as a start.
-
It’s OK to explicitly remove goals, especially once hitting Thu. Looking in reverse: what are the odds I perfectly allocate work times at the beginning of the week?
-
Timebox things I spend too much time on. Also use timeboxing to schedule things I skip entirely. But let myself ‘race’ for other stuff.
- Daily blog: spent way too long daily. Timebox. (20m?)
- Inboxes: skipped nearly daily. Timebox. (20m?)
- Zulip checkins: skipped daily. Timebox. (20m?)
- → I need an hour at some point in the day. I always think EOD, but I’m always kind of burnt out. After lunch? And just publish the previous day’s daily blog? Let’s try it.
