When I was in elementary school, each year we were given a shiny new agenda. And I completely ignored it. I tried a few times to write in deadlines and be organized, but I never felt much benefit from using it, and quickly gave up on it. In an external sense, it never caused me any problems. I always got my assignments done on time, one way or another. I actually hated the idea of being organized, and much preferred to have as much unstructured time as possible, leaving it to myself to start my assignments when I was ready. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a grand tradition of procrastination throughout my school career, which gradually worsened as the assignments grew bigger and I learned how to stay up later. But one day, long after they stopped giving us free agendas, I had a change of heart.

It was September 2012, and I was nervous. I had just started an internship doing physics research, and I was worried about how I would balance a full-time job with all of the other responsibilities I had gotten myself into. At the time, that included studying Japanese (and preparing to take the JLPT), taking Stanford’s Machine Learning course online, taking a professional development course from my home university, and doing some web design work for a previous employer.

Like many people, I sometimes wrestle with procrastination, and the bigger the responsibility, the more the problem seems to be amplified. My past experience has been that having a lot of stuff I should be doing makes me want to avoid working on it, which later results in feelings of guilt over neglecting it.

Source: Owl Turd

It’s totally classic behavior for a procrastinator; thinking about deadlines or work is uncomfortable, so the brain looks for a distraction to minimize the discomfort. In the recent past, my way of dealing with this was to limit the number of responsibilities I formally accepted at one time: fewer responsibilities means less stress and anxiety. But it felt very restrictive to maintain only a select few habits. This time was different. I had decided that I genuinely wanted to make progress on all of these fronts simultaneously. Surely, I thought to myself, surely I can find a way to get the work done without stressing myself out too much. So I wracked my brain thinking about productivity techniques I had encountered before, and how I might fit them to my purpose.

In the years I’ve spent studying Japanese, I came across the tool of timeboxing (as well as the related Pomodoro technique). The basic idea of timeboxing stems from Parkinson’s law: the more time you are given to complete a task, the longer you will take to do so. The corollary to Parkinson’s law is that if you are given less time, you will work with greater focus and speed. When studying language, this can be pushed to extreme limits to get the dull parts of studying (such as vocab review) out of the way as quickly as possible. If you have 300 flashcard reviews to take care of in Anki, it’s a bit daunting and you might drag your feet getting started. But if you promise yourself that you’ll only spend 5 minutes on it for now, you can make a considerable dent in your reviews, and it helps you completely forget about procrastination. You just have to do a few more 5 minute sprints, and suddenly the dreary task of daily review is out of the way.

It is really that latter property that I wanted to take advantage of, though increased focus and efficiency was a useful side effect. It seemed that the key was in making that promise to yourself that no matter what, you were going to start working when your schedule starts and stop working when the time is up. I’ve come up with three possible reasons for why this matters. The first is that it’s related to Parkinson’s law, and the end of the timebox functions as a kind of deadline that helps you spring into action. The second is that you’re limiting your time investment—whatever you’re working on will take a finite and quantifiable amount of time, so there’s no need to drag your feet. But to me, the most plausible reason is that the separation between the planning and execution of a task makes it easier to accomplish. Planning, or making decisions, takes willpower, and willpower is a finite resource. If you know you’ll be executing immediately, it gets much harder to make objective decisions about what you should be doing. If making decisions depletes your willpower, you probably won’t have enough left to start working on your biggest tasks. It’s like being in a conflict of interest with your own brain.

So, I sketched out a basic system loosely based on this principle. Every day, I allocated my free time (that is, the time after I got home from work) in 1 hour intervals. I didn’t have an agenda or dayplanner, but I took some scrap paper and wrote out a schedule that told me which hour of which day was to be spent on which task. Breaks and mealtimes were allocated this way too. During the allocated time, I pledged to work until the last minute on the assigned task, but as soon as it ended, I was to drop what I was doing, and consult the schedule to see the next task. You can see the first weekday schedule I used below:

Time	Activity
-17:00	Day job
17:00-17:30	Finish up at work, go home
17:30-18:30	Study Japanese (review)
18:30-19:30	Prepare and eat dinner
19:30-20:30	Free time
20:30-21:30	Work on (ML, PD, or web dev)
21:30-22:30	Study Japanese (immersion)
22:30-23:30	Free time

 

I used this schedule up until mid-December, when I had taken the JLPT and my two online courses were finished. Overall, the experiment was quite successful, since I passed the JLPT and my courses, and put some regular hours into web development without feeling excessively stressed out. In my scheduled hours of free time, I was able to rest properly, without feeling anxious about all the work that I wasn’t doing that moment.

It took surprisingly little discipline to stick to the schedule. Once the schedule was written out, it was usually pretty easy to execute. However, this was also a weak point of the system—the few times I did break my own rules, it took a lot more willpower to get back on track. Since using it some more, I’ve found that one way to deal with it is writing out new schedules much more frequently. It helps reaffirm my willpower a bit, keeps things fresh, and helps avoid situations where I’m double booked or gave myself inadequate time. I’ve also found that it’s helpful to write out schedules with pen and paper, rather than keeping a digital copy. It’s nice to have the schedule in view on my desk at all times, and the fact that it’s not easily edited is a good mental reminder to stick to the schedule.

When I look back to elementary school, I think my initial revulsion toward agendas was linked to a simple misunderstanding of their strengths. I had always thought that the main purpose of agendas was to prevent yourself from forgetting deadlines. But during elementary school, I had too few responsibilities to need an agenda. And indeed even in 2012, my primary responsibilities occupied so much of my mental space that they caused me anxiety even during my free time. I wasn’t going to forget them anytime soon. The real advantage of agendas is that they help me separate the planning and execution of a task. When those two steps are lumped together, I’m far more likely to procrastinate. But when they’re separated, I can step back and more objectively plan what needs to get done. And when it’s time to execute, there’s less compromise and procrastination, and more focused effort.

After that experience in 2012, I went back to a less organized approach for a while, and just let myself get to my chores when I felt up to it. I currently use hourly schedules from time to time during busy periods, or weekends where I need to get some work done. I still love having unstructured time, but for productivity, it’s hard to beat a bit of structure.