My Time and Focus. Part 1: But why?

Introduction

The purpose of this series of posts is to share some details of my journey of organizing myself. I think this might be interesting or even useful for somebody, but I am mostly writing this to stay motivated to continue (and as writing practice).

I’ll start by explaining the problems I’m trying to solve and why they matter. Along the way, I might learn new things or find some insights I missed in the past. In other words, I want to begin by describing things I already understand, and after that, I would like to continue the series by making «progress updates».

Please note that the experience described is not universal and your mileage may vary.

So what is the problem, exactly?

Do you feel like your ambitions break against the wall of life? There are so many things that need your attention, and so many things that you distract yourself with, that the things you think are important all feel hindered.

I found myself in a situation like that when it is difficult to have consistent progress in anything, and the existing approach to life is just not good enough. My attention gets scattered between work, life events, a bunch of personal projects and other things I like to do (like reading, gaming and chatting with my friends). Any attempts to learn something new feel disappointing, knowledge feels ephemeral, and even if you remember something, it’s just a bunch of random facts and not something you could consider reliable.

This dissatisfaction has led me to make attempts to analyze the situation and come up with ways to improve it. There’s no «final solution» and probably never going to be, but there is a journey towards the destination, and this is what these posts are about. I am already quite far from where I started, I have passed a few milestones along the way, and I have ideas about where to head next.

I’ll reiterate on the problem in a more granular way, specifying it in terms of circumstances and what changes I want to see, so we can analyze how the strategies I employ can help with that.

1. I do not like how my attention can be dispersed. Instead, I want to feel like I am not wasting my time. This doesn’t just apply to activities, but also life in general. I don’t want to feel like time is slipping through my fingers.
2. I do not like my approach to learning things because of how random and disorganized it is. I want to improve my focus on the process, improve knowledge retention and make the activity more systemized.

I should point out that these things are based on my perception and on some standards that I set for myself. Figuring out if the standards are reasonable and not too high or low is a separate question that I’m not going to discuss much because I think it is individual for everybody.

What strategies do I use?

I would say that my efforts in self-organisation can essentially be split into two parts:

• Adjusting the environment for myself
• Adjusting myself to the environment

Both of them consist of multiple little things. For example, a big part of adjusting the environment is controlling sources of distractions. But one can’t just remove everything they consider a distraction from their life, as their needs and desires can change, and, well, balance is important.

Another interesting way to adjust the environment is to create some structure where there isn’t one. For example, timeblocking techniques. It’s not always straightforward though and can be difficult not just on the stage of setting it up, but also on the stage of following it.

The other part, adjusting yourself to the environment, is also a tricky one. For me, it is about learning to work with what you have. One of the adjustments I heavily rely upon is the skill of taking notes I have developed. At this moment, I consider note-taking the core of my self-organisation efforts. Note-taking will be the primary focus of these posts, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Adjusting the environment

Managing distractions

As I mentioned, one of the ways to adjust the environment to yourself is by controlling distractions in the environment. I think I can separate distractions into two categories based on their nature:

• Opportunistic distractions. Let’s imagine you have a habit of browsing the web aimlessly (reddit, hacker news, facebook, youtube etc.) This is an opportunistic distraction. When you are doing something you don’t like, the web is always waiting for you, ready to save you from the unpleasant activity.
• Interruptive distractions. Let’s imagine you have a phone and it can make sounds. Notifications can interrupt whatever you are doing and break the flow or just provide an escape from the thing that you didn’t want to do.

For both of these, I think the main thing you can do is learn to recognize them. Recognition, in turn, will allow you to think about how to mitigate the problems caused by them (if you want to, of course).

With opportunistic distractions, I find it useful to shift them in time. I know I need my daily dose of the web, so I prefer to do it intentionally when I feel like it’s not harming other things. I think removing it entirely can be a recipe for disaster or just counterproductive.

With interruptive distractions, it’s a little easier. My Windows, macOS and iPadOS are always in focus mode, so notifications don’t just randomly appear on the screen. Certain emails automatically go to a hidden label in gmail, so I don’t even know they exist until I am ready to work with them. For some time even my phone had «Do not disturb» constantly enabled, allowing me to engage in communication only when I feel like I am ready, however, I don’t enable it as much anymore.

In general, I can say that this approach of opting in for notifications rather than opting out of them has been a good thing for me and my productivity and has not resulted in problems or conflicts.

Email inbox

Just a few paragraphs about emails. Ever since I had my first email address (around 2009, I think), I had a huge ever-growing and overwhelming inbox, where I tried to delete all the irrelevant stuff and left many things unread.

However, a few years ago I changed my approach. I made sure to reduce the number of emails I get. I have almost no subscriptions that I don’t want to see in my inbox. If it’s a subscription that I don’t want to remove, but also don’t think it’s important, it gets automatically archived and assigned a separate label. Some of my separate labels are Github, Gitlab, Amazon, Medium, and Meetup.

I stopped deleting emails because there are almost no emails that I would want to delete.

But the main change was in what I do with incoming emails. You see, instead of deleting emails, you can archive them. And instead of keeping them in the inbox forever, you can… also archive them. So, there are now only 9 emails in my inbox at the moment of writing this. I archive them as soon as there is no action I would need to take about them. And I leave them unread until I am ready to read them.

I know I won’t lose them because there is only a handful of them there at all times. That probably won’t scale if you’re Linus Torvalds, though.

Structuring time

Time structuring is an interesting topic because I can call it highly experimental in the context of my life. So, have you heard of timeblocking?

You can do timeblocking in many ways. My history of attempting it is quite long, it starts in my childhood and it is full of failures. However, I think it still had an overall positive effect and I periodically return to try it again.

My first timeblocking attempts started with trying to draw out the coming week on a piece of paper and fill in the areas where I had to be doing something certain. That didn’t go too well because that was difficult to edit, difficult to replicate every week, and difficult to follow.

My future attempts usually consisted of filling in my Google Calendar with events, representing things I had to be doing. I tried that several times and usually failed to follow the schedule pretty quickly.

I also tried apps, specifically designed for this - like TimeTune. I stopped paying attention to it pretty quickly, although the idea of a notification constantly hanging there on your phone, saying what you should be doing now was something I had been kind of dreaming for quite a while.

I am currently attempting timeblocking again, with Google Calendar, but also using an app called Sectograph, which provides me with a very cool visual clock face widget on my phone’s desktop. I think this is quite epic, even though it is still difficult to pay attention to it sometimes.

But it has worked pretty well for me when my calendar wasn’t very packed and it reminded me about upcoming things like calls with my friends or parents.

Adjusting myself

Now that we have looked at other important things, we can move on to the main focus of the post, the other «half» of self-organisation efforts. As I mentioned, my main tool for it is extensive note-taking.

Note-taking

Most people take notes in daily life, right? Those can be grocery lists, work things, house chores, personal projects, health stuff, journals, and all that.

My notes allow me to hypothesize solutions to problems and track progress in applying them, along with many other things. They also help me remember events or thoughts that are important to me.

In other words, my notes are a framework that works as my external brain: they allow me to store and retrieve information, along with providing structure for achieving certain goals.

However, this framework is a thing that one should adapt to themselves. To achieve goals by using the framework, one should know what one wants.

What do I want from note-taking then?

I want life to be simpler. Kind of. I want achievements to be closer. I want progress to be consistent. I am willing to optimize myself to have a better chance of living up to my ambitions.

Those were some of the things that I am heavily relying on my notes for. My notes make progress feel more solid, they make knowledge feel less ephemeral. (Also teaches me how to write better :p )

Because of this, there are three main parameters I am trying to optimize my note-taking framework for:

1. How easy it is to track events happening around me, progress in my activities and personal growth and well-being;
2. How efficient is taking (and using) notes when learning various things. This is something to do with knowledge retention and other benefits of having a personal knowledge base;
3. How simple it is to draw conclusions from my notes and possibly make whole «essays» out of them.

Number 1 directly corresponds to the cirumstance+change pair about my attention getting dispersed from the beginning of this post. It allows me to:

• Save the context of my activities so it is easier to return to them if I switch to something else;
• Back up memories about things I think are important;
• Make decisions that are thought-out better, allowing me to control innate impulsiveness to some extent;
• Progress in things that refuse to move forward when you just keep thinking about them in a loop;
• Be more mindful about what I’m doing.

Number 2 directly corresponds to the circumstance+change pair about systemizing my learning process and improving knowledge retention. The mere fact that some knowledge is recorded helps with its understanding and retention, even if you never return to it. It’s even better if you take an effort to rephrase whatever you’re learning and organize it by yourself. It just feels nice, and it is probably quite efficient. I like it.

So, let’s see what we can do with these parameters for optimization ;)

Formalization of the note-taking framework

I am going to define some nice boundaries that are going to be the cornerstones of the framework. That should help with information consistency and save thinking time by providing a set of basic answers to what should be done. That will reduce the usage barrier for the framework.

However, that doesn’t mean that these boundaries can’t be redefined. I am willing to adjust the «rules» if that makes the situation better, I just want them to be clear.

1. Independently of the synchronization medium used and the ability of said medium to provide access to older versions of information, accessing these old revisions should not be a part of the work process¹. Why? Because it will make things too complicated otherwise.
2. There should be separate sections for notes, each conforming to one of the parameters mentioned earlier. This way, I can optimize the sections separately.
3. There should be a way to link information together within and outside of said sections.

Based on these boundaries, I decided that I need these sections in my notes:

1. Journal
2. Knowledge base
3. Essays

I’m going to leave the details for the second part that is to follow soon after the publication of this one. I will give you a sneak peek into what the next post is going to cover:

 ~/Proj/notes (wsl)
 λ find . -type f -name "*.md" -print0 | xargs -0 cat | wc
   9411   81843  875696

This is 9411 line breaks and 81843 words in my notes. I start every sentence on a new line in my markdown files, so line breaks roughly show the number of sentences (although there are also extra line breaks to separate paragraphs).

In part 2, I intend to cover all three sections in detail and tell you how this system evolved into what it is now.

Afterword

Is there ever going to be an end to what feels like a lifelong race against the clock? Won’t the framework get so complicated that it will be impossible to adhere to it? And could the problem possibly be imaginary?

My thoughts on this are quite simple. I feel like it is worth exploring, and also that it is more helpful than not. However, some care should be taken to not fall into a trap of wishful thinking. The problem should be open to redefinition based on new information.

Thanks for reading the first part! Feel free to reach back to me to comment on something, ask a question or request a correction/addition of information.