Tim Harford's book Adapt tells about the importance of adapting off-the-shelf systems with trial, error and feedback to suit particular needs.
The biggest difference between salaried employment and work as a freelancer or an entrepreneur is in time management. At worst, nobody notices if you get up from bed and use your day to do productive work. If you have any inclination to procrastinate, systematic time management makes all the difference in getting your deliverables finished and shipped to stakeholders in schedule. In this essay time management is not treated as a question of self-discipline, which can be manipulated with inspirational quotes. Rather, it is a matter of technique where you need to find a collection of mind tricks that allow you to put in as many hours of productive work as you used to do in salaried employment under external attention.
A good time management system has three parts:
The most important part of time management is to track if your system is taking you towards your goals. If the other parts of the system do not work for you, you will notice it through self-reflection. After that you can troubleshoot by trying out different ways to allocate time and manage action points. Self-reflection is the most important part of the system because it can fix problems in the other parts. People are different in what spurs them into action and how they approach challenges. You must adapt any off-the-shelf system to work with your personal strengths and weaknesses by using self-reflection.
Time log tracks how you actually use your time. The most important things to track are (1) how many hours you successfully poured into scheduled projects and (2) what makes you waste time excessively.
1.1.2018 07.00 - 07.50: Breakfast 07.50 - 08.20: Wasting time 08.20 - 10.40: MAIN3: Scripting (2h) 10.40 - 11.00: Wasting time 11.00 - 11.30: LOW2: Laundry (0.5h) 11.30 - 12.00: Eating, coffee ... 23.00 - 23.45: Wasting time (procrastionation cut-off on studying) 23.45 - 00.00: Teeth, stretching
The above example uses 5-minute accuracy. Start writing the time log as soon as you open the computer in the morning. The time log starts from the moment you wake up and stops when you go to sleep in the evening, but some log lines might be written only on the next day.
The entries which denote schedules projects start with a project identifier (for exampls MAIN3) and end with the amount of time you estimate you actually worked on the project.
There are two ways to mark procrastination. Longer stretches have their own "wasting time" lines. Shorter spells are marked inside scheduled project lines. For example, the last MAIN3 line took 2.5h of time, but poured only 2h of time into the MAIN3 project. This means that there was 0.5h of mere chair-warming interlaced with productive work.
The log above was written with Notepad since it benefits from fixed-with font. When keeping time log or to-do lists, text editors have several advantages over spreadsheets or purpose-build software:
Counting hours is not enough - you also need to track if you are making progress towards your goals. To do this you need to write the goals down so you can check afterwards why you didn't reach them without wishful thinking or quiet desparation coloring your memories. Left alone, human brains are masters of self-deception.
In the diary, each week starts with a planning entry. It recounts the main events that are expected to happen that week and sets 1-5 goals for that week. The goals may be quantitative like "aim to pour 20h into project X" or quantitative like "finish deliverable Y" or "attend event Z." Weekly goals should be smart: specific, measurable, achievable and relevant. They are always timed to be finished in one week.
The week ends with a Weekly Review to check how many pre-set goals were reached. This might be a binary check (reached/not reached), an overview of reasons ("caught cold on Tuesday, messed the whole week") or a score. For example, suppose you wanted to pour 20h into your main project in the weekly plan and scored the goal it to be worth 5 points. Then pouring 15h is worth 15h/20h * 5p =~ 4 points.
The three most important metrics in the weekly review are:
In addition you might want to write a short diary entry each day, recounting things that are not already in the time log like important discussions with the people you met.
Tim Harford's book Adapt tells about the importance of adapting off-the-shelf systems with trial, error and feedback to suit particular needs.
This section is loosely based on David Allen's book Getting Things Done, which describes how to write good to-do lists. A to-do list is a list of actions, which can be performed. When you allocate time to a project, you are allocating time to perform actions in that project's to-do list.
The most important feature of a to-do action is that it is doable (*). A to-do list is not a list of open issues but a list of action points. For example "Hole in the roof" is not an action point, but "walk through the attic and put buckets where water has dropped" is doable as well as "call a roof repair expert" or "open the roof tile and search for mold along seams (postponed until it stops raining)" A good to-do item contains 5 fields:
The status can be one of the following:
(*) The GTD book uses the word actionable. However, in legalese actionable means something that can be sued. Therefore The Economist Style Guide discourages using the word actionable in any non-legal meaning.
Projects aim to produce deliverables to stakeholders. A deliverable may be something as simple as a wired payment, or as complex as a published book.
A deliverable is finished when you have shipped it to a stakeholder. At that point, you no more need to perform actions. Before a deliverable is finished, you need to perform one or more actions to take it from its current status to the stakeholder. Action point delta is the difference between the current status of the project and the finished status - a list of actions which need to be performed.
The to-do list should be comprehensive and capture the whole action delta. In larger projects you can't know beforehand what exact actions are required. The way to deal with this is to write down the item at high level of abstraction and make them more specific later. For example, publishing a book may be written into one to-do item: "Write a book about topic X. First action: List the topics you intend to cover. Finished when the book has been shipped to a publisher." This to-do item abstracts away vast number of hours spent on background research. It is included in "writing a book" but not mentioned specifically. While getting your hands inky with the first action, the level of abstraction gradually decreases as you write down specific background research tasks under the main task of writing a book. For the most vague parts you need not doable tasks to achieve a comprehensive to-do lists which covers the whole action point delta on a very high level.
Usually intuitive priorization is enough. If an action needs to be performed before handing over the deliverable, priorization doesn't matter - you need to perform it anyway. If the action isn't needed, you can change its status to "not needed".
Deadline priorization means writing a separate category for an interim deliverable, for example a software deployment at the end of a sprint or a book outline for a publisher to make a publishing decision. In deadline priorization you restrict scope by selecting a subset of actions, which produce sufficient quality for the interim deliverable, while leaving other improvements (next sprint cycle, full book) to the future.
David Allen's book Getting Things Done
tells how to write good to-do lists.
So as a free man, you wake up at 7 AM, eat a quick breakfast and waste some time checking social media, until at 8 AM you are ready to start work and pour in 8 hours of solid work like you did as a disciplined professional in the office. At 8.00 you open the to-do list, but since there is still plenty of time (8 hours!) you read some news before starting to work. At 17.00 you notice that unfortunately there is no time to go play outside, since you still haven't poured in any hours. Fortunately, it's no problem to go to sleep at 01 AM, since nobody is checking your progress, so you can read an article to which a friend of yours linked before starting to do in the disciplined 8 hours of work...
The following time management system counters this kind of procrastination by creating artificial scarcity in hours. The first core concept is procrastination cut-off. When your time log shows that you have procrastinated for over an hour after 8 AM, you cut off losses by moving to the next scheduled project, not working on that project at that specific day. Desire to not see the project go into procrastination cut-off motivates to push yourself for a few hours. The idea is that it is better to work fewer hours on main projects than to waste countless hours to procrastination.
Procrastination cut-off increases the hours put into all scheduled projects, while slowing down the main project. Then how can you pour in enough ours to earn an income? The answer is to split the main project into several scheduling units, each of which is subjected to procrastination cut-off individually. Even if one project phase goes to procrastination cut-off, other work for income progresses as planned.
At the weekly review, you decide the list of scheduled project for the next week. Scheduled projects have three categories:
For example suppose that you took time off work to write a book. Then it is your high-priority project, because it is linked to your income - either by earning sales income from it or by going back to salaried employment after it is finished without commerical success.
Then your high-priority project queue might be:
Each scheduled project has its own to-do list.
Note that the big project is divided to several phases of work, so you can mercilessly apply procrastination cut-off and also you only need to work on an individual scheduled project for fewer hours a day. If you get stuck doing one phase for the whole day with high productivity, that's great! But don't count on getting into flow every day. Soon you will finish the pieces which you can do in the state of flow. 3-part time management will help you over the difficult parts where you can't get into flow for weeks or even months.
Low-priority projects might include
Daily projects are something you do daily. Physical exercise should be one of them unless you do menial work. Without physical exercise your ability to concentrate and withstand stress will suffer.
The relationship between high and low priority projects is that you alternate between high and low, for example H1 L1 H2 L2 H3 L3, or some other method of alternation. This decreases your boredom with the main project and increases the sense of artificial scarcity ("If I don't work on background research tasks NOW, it gets stuck for several days!") To priorize, work on the high-priority tasks longer.
The project codes (H1, L4, etc.) are something that you write to the time log to count the total number of hours poured into high-priority work each week.