The modern flow of time management in schools and offices is characterized by continuous interruption. Time management tools like the Pomodoro technique help individuals break up their day into focused chunks, but do not attempt to solve the larger problem of time management for ambitious individuals — how to efficiently juggle everything that needs to get done. The most widely used method to manage deadlines, priorities, and important (but often unplanned) interruptions has remained the manual ToDo list.
However, planning for long projects only incrementally; day-by-day, Pomodoro session by Pomodoro session, has significant downsides. Consider the decision fatigue incurred by this workflow — constant reevaluation of priorities drains intellectual energy and puts the chronic procrastinator at a serious disadvantage.
There’s just too much opportunity to make the wrong choice. This leads to the second downside. This incremental planning doesn’t have strong assurances to meet deadlines. There are no metrics to ensure work is on track, and the only feedback mechanism is an ever increasing level of stress as deadlines begin to loom closer.
We’ve become addicted to stress. As an instinctive response it’s helpful; stress is often a compass pointing to important work that needs doing. If you don’t have the time to categorize and prioritize, you can rely on your stress to make sure that some priority is on your mind. But it’s a blunt and imprecise tool.
Eventually, an over-reliance on stress leads to panic, where good decision making breaks down and a decent workflow can devolve into chaos. Even worse, long-term chronic stress brings burnout. Eventually, a chronic stressor may lose their ability to work effectively without being behind on a looming deadline, and will build the nasty habit of procrastination.
When speaking about procrastination, I’m speaking from experience. It’s why I’ve set out to replace stress as the “priority compass”. Not via platitudes about discipline, but with a concrete tool coupled with a few simple habits.
This is the beginning of the development of a more automatic and reliable system for modern time management. We’ll target having robust assurances that work is progressing and meeting deadlines. The system builds on the time boxing Pomodoro technique to preserve focus and quantize task progress, but also remain flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances. This adaptation should be a automated feedback mechanism, a full replacement for deadline-stress.