About time management

I have always been a person who likes to make plans for myself, but the efficiency is still not very good. Whenever I see a good book or other things of interest, I always think like this: When should I read this book? Will I watch it this year? Don't be surprised why it is so large this year, because I have collected a pile of books to prepare for reading. Even the question is whether this book was read before or after it? It was a long time later.

Yes, I used to spend too much time collecting what I wanted to do and planning them, but I ignored this moment. For example, I always want to take a good look at the introduction to algorithms. But actually, the goal of my current free time is to repeat C ++ and go deeper. I spend too much time thinking about what to do in the future, which affects my current plan.

It wasn't long ago that I learned about GTD that I was a kind of person with a "collection addiction". I only knew about the collection, but I did a bad job on the "get thing done" page. Recently, I began to follow GTD's collection, processing, organization, review, and implementation steps to clarify the priorities and do it one by one. However, the actual implementation of GTD varies with each other. It is good to have this idea, so you do not have to stick to it. Specifically, due to the previous "Collection habits", I only need to organize and organize them well. Every weekend, I will put the things to be done next week into the todo list, next, let's review the implementation of the plan for this week to see if the plan for the next week is reasonable. Then, we will finish the plan one by one next week.

The method seems to be good, but when we do it, we find that our execution is not enough, mainly because we cannot force ourselves to concentrate on completing the current task. Then I searched for the related work methods and thought that the tomato work method was suitable for me. Simply put, the tomato work method is to set a tomato time, usually 25 minutes, and is inseparable. Start a tomato time and start a task, focus on it until 25 minutes, rest for 5 minutes, and then continue the next tomato time. If you do something unrelated to the current task during a tomato time, the tomato time will be voided. Generally, four tomatoes can be rested for a long time.

If GTD is a macro time management method, tomato is microscopic. The combination of the two has indeed helped me a lot. Most of my plans are to be completed on the computer, such as project, C ++, and technical books, so I chose a PC software to manage my plan. I have tried several software products, some do not have clients, only the web version, and some tasks cannot allocate multiple tomatoes. In fact, the xortime function is good, but the UI is too bad. pomodairo is a little simple, in addition, I don't want to install Adobe AIR just for this purpose. Some apps on the mobile phone end can also be used just because I don't want to go on a cell phone any longer, and I'm afraid I will go to other apps accidentally. At last, teamviz was used, a tomato working method software with the idea of GTD, which has basic GTD functions and perfect Tomato time functions, and provides personal data statistics. The disadvantage is that the synchronization between devices is charged. Although the cost is not high (1.99 knives a month), I do not need to synchronize it. It is enough to use it on a computer. The software looks like the following (pictures Stolen from the official website ):

The left side is the category of various tasks. The first column on the home page is the task in the selected category, and the second column is the task to be executed today (today's tasks ), the third column is unplanned tasks ). Every weekend, I will write my plans for the next week to the task lists of various categories, and set the expected number of tomatoes for each task. If it is a foreseeable task but it is not required for the next week, drag it to unplanned tasks. Then, we can drag the task of the day to today's tasks every morning, and start to finish the Tomato time item. This software can also operate the desktop floating window, which is very convenient:

Of course, there are also many planned things that do not need to be completed by computers, such as reading a psychology book and having dinner and communication with students, but I don't want to use the Tomato time for timing such a thing. There are some other things that people will usually set up in reminders, such as making a call to XX at tonight, and remembering to buy milk at the supermarket tomorrow, I use a simple fit tab to remind myself. The average thing is to let the red dot on the icon remind me, you only need to set an alarm in fit for what needs to be done at a certain time point. The software is as follows:

It took more than a week to start using GTD and tomato work methods, but it benefited a lot. There were more plans completed in this week than before, we hope that our future work and study will continue in an orderly and effective manner.

About time management