This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

Temporal Workspaces

Page created: 2023-05-30 , updated: 2023-07-19

Using recurring daily blocks of time as a "workspace" for specific projects and habits.

Up to projects or workspaces.

Related: computers-as-workspaces.

This card directly follows project-balance, which was half regular musing about projects and half cry for help.

Update less than two months later: After writing this, not only did I switch to having just one regular "time track" (the rest is "chaos time"!), I also did my first ramp-down!

I have two problems:

  1. I am doing way too many things concurrently.

  2. I don’t want to give any of them up and I do like switching between them to some degree.

Aside: I think I should also note that in the History of Dave, starting this many things is not unusual…​but actually keeping them going is VERY unusual. I used to: Start too many things, declare project bankruptcy, abandon all but the most shiny new project, and get on with my life. It always left a taste of faint regret in my mouth, but I didn’t agonize over it. So this is a new experience for me.

Anyway, I was thinking about how much stuff I should even attempt to juggle and how to keep track of it all when I realized I’ve been dancing around a concept for a while now without addressing it head-on: Using specific recurring daily blocks of time as a mental "workspace" for a specific project.

Three time tracks?

picture of a drawing from my notebook

This image from my pocket notebook shows my situation:

  • A big chunk of the week is allotted to the "day job" (gotta pay for food and roof over the head).

  • I usually have some time in the morning, but it’s variable and hard to depend on with children in the house, school schedules, etc.

  • I pretty much always have time at night after everyone else has gone to sleep, but I’m often too physically exhausted or mentally drained to use it. (And I need my sleep too!)

  • The late afternoon and evening is uncertain - sometimes I have a nice big block of time. Sometimes I have no time.

  • Weekends are pure chaos.

As you can see, I have two somewhat dependable times: "Morning" and "Night". When viewed flowing from one day to the next, they appear continuous, so I’ll call these "time tracks".

(And just for the heck of it, that spawned a new card: time-tracks.)

I’ve found that I can set these two times aside for myself to be used for specific projects. As with physical workspaces, these time blocks help me form a habit and take away that soul-killing question, "What should I be doing right now?" I’ve been doing this intentionally at night with assembly-nights, but also by acquired habit in the morning with a specific writing project.

"Evening" time isn’t stable enough to be counted upon. So it blends into "other" to become, interestingly, a third time called "Chaos" that I can think of as a track of its own. Unlike "Morning" and "Night", its size and shape is a complete mystery until after it happens.

With these three time "tracks", I can now sort my projects into three concurrent queues:

+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| "Morning" | "Night"   | "Chaos"   |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| Project A | Project I | Project X |
| Project B | Project J | Project Y |
| Project C |           | Project Z |
| Project D |           |           |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+

Relief

This seems to solve my problems to a certain amount of satisfaction because:

  1. I’m not forced to give up on everything.

  2. I’m still going to be switching between tasks, but…​

  3. …​in a manageable dependable way that works well with habit-building.

  4. I get the peace of mind knowing that I’ll get to everything in due time.

(I’m still going to give myself plenty of leeway to re-order the track queues and swap tasks between tracks. But at least this gives me additional structure.)

Between this time track "discovery" and writing this card, I did realize that I’d re-invented the "Swim Lane" diagram or chart (wikipedia.org). But since those were developed to keep track of "resources" (or "human beings" as I like to call them), not one’s own time, I’ll be sticking with my terminology. :-)

Update: I like my new lists. The feels do-able. I also neglected to mention another vital list: the project-pool.