My Time Management

The problem

How do we know what we have to do right now, since 1 hour and tomorrow? Usually, it is just our memory and ability to remind something in right time and the right place. In some cases it works well but anyway this definitely can be improved.

The solution

There are tons of books about time management and a lot of tracking systems in the field. But I’m happy that the first one that I have read was Максим Дорофеев, “Джедайские техники”. This book is one of the best in my opinion for beginners in self-management techniques. This book:

1. Helps to create and organize your task list in a very clear way.
2. Shows best practices how to translate your task from mind into an easy-to-read sentence.
3. Shows hot to free up your RAM and think only about current task.
4. How to wisely use your everyday refillable resources.

Also, there are a lot of references to another more deep and theoretical literature but if you are a novice like I am, this book is a good start.

Tools that I use

Every developer has its own favorite toolset so here is mine.

Todoist

I have tried a couple of web apps and mobile application for task management and figured out that the most suitable for me is Todoist. Its features are:

1. Very clean and comfortable web interface.
2. A bunch of clients for PC, Mac, Android, iOS.
3. Own DSL that helps to create tasks very fast without any additional clicks and interactions, only keyboard. And I really like this feature, for example, you can type #Personal today start listening to new podcast series and todoist will automatically create a task for Personal project for today. This ability makes this feature really useful.
4. Calendars integration.
5. Free plans that cover 99% of everyday requirements.
6. Every day and overall score. It sounds like a senseless feature but if you like to contest yourself and have some kind of statistics and visualizations this feature can give you this.

Usual calendar

Everybody uses calendars but if you integrate todoist into your calendar this bundle becomes really powerful.

Sum up

Knowledge from that book and described tools are very useful for me in everyday activities and I hope you can find something interesting in them for you as well.