Time Management, Attention & Scheduling

Time management in this vault answers three questions, in this order. Which work is worth scheduling at all. What one hard target needs so it is still finished by the end of the day. How work still gets done on an ordinary day when nothing is going particularly well. Task management answers the first question by deciding whether a piece of work is worth timing. Scheduling assigns the work that passes that test to set times, and names one or two items that may displace every other item on the schedule. Attention and focus keep a person on the chosen work once the day has started. The methods for each part are on the pages linked below.

The child pages

Task management decides whether a piece of work should be scheduled. Scheduling assigns the chosen work to set times. Prioritization puts the list in order. Urgency trapping is the failure in which every task feels due at once, so no single task can be picked out as the one to do first.

Prioritization. Priority 0+1 System is the sorting method: it sets what matters, so that the order of the day is not decided over again throughout the morning.

Tasks. Task Management decides whether a task gets done before deciding when it gets done. Its parts are one inbox, the evening sort, and the three lenses.

Scheduling. Building a Schedule That Survives turns priorities into time blocks that are still kept on an ordinary day. Study Scheduling applies the same method to study.

Attention. Focus Management covers starting focused work inside a time block and returning to it after an interruption. Attention Span and Focus Training covers attention span itself: how long attention stays on one task. OFF-Rest Timing covers rest after a period of focused work. Flow State covers flow, the focused state that the scheduling and focus methods above are meant to produce.

Postponed decisions. Decisional Delays covers putting off a decision whose outcome is needed before work can begin.

A hub page that names topics without linking to them gives the reader no way to reach those topics. Each page listed above has a link. These pages do not cover ways to fit more working hours into a day.

What these practices are for

These practices are a major part of Self-Management: they create the external conditions Self-Regulation, Deep Processing, and Retrieval need. Techniques - Learning Craft is the broader hub for the learning methods themselves; the practices in this cluster only set aside time for those methods. These practices have to work on ordinary days.

Open Questions

When should a sixth child page be linked from this hub instead of from one of the existing child pages?

Sources

The closest publicly known idea to this hub treats attention as the scarce resource and treats time management as directing that attention, as opposed to getting more hours out of a day. The mechanisms are described on the child pages.