Time management for a programmer

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How do you use the money if you use up 86400 yuan a day to access your bank account?

Is there such a good thing in the world?

Yes, and this kind of good thing is happening every day. You really have such an account, that is, "Time ". Every day, every person will have a new 86400 S, and the value of this 86400 S is far greater than 86400 yuan. So, in the face of such a wealth. How are you going to use them?

Actually, I don't know how you use them, but I know how I use them. I will share some of my time management experiences with you.

Today is 9,142nd, the first day I came to this world.

I learned the concept of time management from Baidu encyclopedia one day in the second year of college. Before that, I often heard about time management, but it seems that they have nothing to do with me, because they were in the "happy period" of college ", every day is "abundant" and there is no need to manage it. If you have been in college, you should know what I mean.

But fate is doomed to a turning point in everyone's life. When I entered a new group and a new environment (upgrading my class), I suddenly realized how short my time was, how many learning tasks, and how many things I had to do, but there are so many bad things left for you all over the world. So I proposed a proposition for myself: "How should I manage my time ?"

With the proposition, I began to look for various theories, tools, and practices. In fact, I personally think time management is not a simple task. In the early days, I thought that time management was a persistent "war". In most cases, I was defeated by my laziness and delayed by myself, they were defeated by their own lack of action, and those so-called "planning arrangements" were shelved.

This is a headache for me. My goal is to manage the time. How to manage the time is getting messy? So I began to reflect again, find the cause of the problem, and ask some experts on the Internet for advice. After some "tossing", I finally found the problem in October 26, 2010: I cannot manage the time, and I should manage myself. The real enemy is not "time", but myself.

It turns out that time has always been there, but we have passed by ourselves.

So I made a new proposition to myself: "How should I manage myself in a limited time ?"

October 26, 2010 is a memorable day for me. This day seems like an epiphany. Let me change from passive to active, and change time from "enemy" to current friends. The real enemy I have locked is my own shortcomings: laziness, delay, and no action.

Another war began. Start to use actual actions to declare war with those enemies in October 26, 2010. As a result, I had my current morning diary and my current self-management system. So far, I have stuck to 366 articles in the morning diary for a whole year. However, since I wrote it to the present 533 days, this calculation is 366/533 = 0.6866, which indicates that my odds are more than half. And those 167 days for various reasons: holiday home, poor status, go out, no computer writing environment, laziness, delay, etc ...... however, from a macro perspective, I have begun to take the initiative and be able to better control myself. For details about the morning diary, refer to this book "Morning diary Miracle".

Next I will share with you how I personally get along with time. Here, we will first explain that the following time management methods have not been implemented in the first place, but after about two years, we have tried various methods, various software and ideas, also experienced various failures, and finally formed their own time management system according to their own characteristics, not necessarily suitable for everyone. I would like to share with you the hope that you can learn and improve it together and point out the shortcomings in our system and give some advice.

Now, the core idea of guiding my time management is GTD (get things done). Its highest goal is to enable the individual to reach the state of mind. The main principle is to move everything in your mind (including ideas, plans, tasks, and so on) and concentrate on what you are doing to achieve efficient work methods.

The basic steps of GTD can be divided into collection, sorting, organization, action, and review.. For the core process, refer:

The above explanations and figures are more general and abstract. I will introduce the entire process based on my actual situation.

My Workplace: mostly in front of computers;

I used one laptop and one smartphone;

The software I used: OneNote, Google calander, outlook, wakoopa.

Step 1: Collect (OneNote + outlook)

Every day, I use OneNote to write the morning diary from half past eight to. In the morning diary, there is a module called today's goal, which is one of my most important inboxes.

Inbox in the OneNote morning diary:

If you have other ideas, add them directly to this module. After entering all the items, press the shortcut key Ctrl + Shift + 1 to add a flag before each item, indicating the meaning of today's items (of course, you can also select other flag, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the next week, and so on ). When the flag appears, these items will appear in your outlook synchronously.

 

Of course, you can also directly write your items in outlook .. The items in inbox here are mainly those of today. If you have pure ideas and irregular items, you can put them in inbox that does not display the diary. The collection process ends here.

 

Step 2: organize

Put these things (stuff) into inbox, it takes some time to sort them out. I personally started to sort them out after writing the morning diary, these items and ideas are classified by the classification method recommended in Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of efficient people, can better control the balance of personal life. For example, I think case 4 is classified as English and marked as "important" or "urgent.

 

Case 4: two boxes will be added before the flag (of course, the color and category names can be customized)

 

Step 3: Organization (core steps)Divide the categories and prioritize each task. The rest is to organize and plan the tasks and analyze the nature of the events. First, stick to the two-minute principle. If this task can be completed in two minutes, do it immediately. If it cannot be completed in two minutes? 1) delay. It can be arranged in a calendar as an agent. 2) delegate. To be handed over to others. 3) project. Schedule a project. 4) Others: Here is the important start of a day's schedule. in outlook, you can drag the schedule directly to the calendar and edit it. For example:

 

Here, we need to explain that these items and Calendars have a great role and help for your reflection and review, in order to better save this wealth. We recommend that you synchronize these calendars to the network. Google calander is recommended here. After registering an account, you can use a synchronization software to synchronize the local calendar. The synchronization software Google Calendar sync is equivalent to the backup function. Of course, Google calander has more reminder methods and functions, this is also an aspect of using it. The disadvantage is that it can only be used when there is a network, so I think outlook + googlecalander is a good choice and recommended.

Step 4: ActionAfter the above steps, you can start to operate according to the schedule or list. Action is the most critical step in GTD, because many people have stopped here. The main factors that affect the action can be abstracted into two factors: Internal interference and external interference. Here we recommend that you use the "tomato working method ". Action can only be proved by action. More theories and thoughts will become a cloud if no action is taken.

 

Step 5: ReviewThis last step is also indispensable. During the review, we can see what we did on this day? Which plans are disturbed? Where is your time wasted? What are the problems during execution? What should I do next? I will review and analyze myself every night, Monday morning, and the last day of the month at the end of the year. There are two methods:

1) Give yourself another calendar, spend ten minutes in the evening to arrange what to do on the day to another calendar, and compare it with your plan to find problems. If you make changes on a calendar, it will be messy. We recommend that you use two calendars. For example, you can switch the perspective at will. This is a function that Google calander supports Displaying Multiple calendars. You can view the items you plan based on your actual situation and summarize and reflect on them.

 

2) time tracking software: Because my main work and learning environment is in front of a computer, I spend most of my time dealing with computers, specifically applications. We recommend a computer time tracking software, wakoopa (registration required), which can track the time that your computer spends on that application every day, it will analyze your application, which is very good, such:

 

At last, you can record the summary and gains of the day in your morning diary as a precious asset.

So far, the entire GTD process has ended. Readers may think that the above process is a bit complicated and there are some contacts at the beginning, but after learning and taking it as your habit, it will bring you far more benefits than the cost of learning and using it.