I am not good with managing myself. It isn’t natural, so I have to go through hoops and design processes and schemes just to function normally.
I used to do a reflection on my time on a weekly cycle. I did annual review and analysis of my years. On a daily basis, I rely on time boxes, 2 hours each.
It’s not that I would do exactly one thing for 2 hours. It is just a constant reminder that
- I need to focus on at least one thing at every moment
- I need to achieve something every cycle
- I have a measurable way to balance my workload between my different projects.
The last point is important since by nature, I have a strong tendency to work on multiple projects at once. It is not just about multitasking. I like to see everything as a system, and a system needs many different gears moving to work. So I always have a desire to tweak a gear here and there, to add one or remove another, and to expand my system. It’s exciting but also endless.
Which came to what happened last week: I lost tracks of my time boxes for the first time. 4 time boxes a day, 5 days a week. That would be 20. Yet on Friday evening, I only found 16 checked.
I traced back. I looked left and right. I spent time finding my lost time. But nope, they were nowhere to be found. The most logical explanation was I fell asleep for 30 hours and woke up without realizing a day was lost.
So there I was, alone at home on a Friday, staring at a void in my life.
I almost cried. Maybe I did.
If time passed without anyone knowing, did it really pass, or not even one moment had gone by?