Trimming your tasks to save time

#73 - escape rooms, concerts and free notebooks

Hi there,

A whirlwind month comes to an end. 2 weeks of relaxation and revision, both effectively mixed, are to come, with the aim of adding enough of the two ingredients to bake a tasty cake.

2 more concerts this week, along with a greater sense of independence and adventure, travelling to Birmingham alone twice and to London with a school on Friday. I also attended my first awards night at school, a very inspiring and celebratory evening with friends new and old.

Highlight of the week : going to an EdTech show in London on Friday. Despite it being a day off at school, our teacher was happy to take 9 of our ‘Tech Comm’ team down to London to ‘BETT’, a grand opportunity to grab tons of freebies to discover what new technology we could bring to enhance the school. 😁

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In our school awards night last Thursday, I was lucky enough to be given two awards for overall achievement in my GCSEs (they seem like waaay back now) and performance in Economics. Our prize? A book worth up to £15 (each) - pretty good if you ask me.

This proved an arduous task; a scroll through my Chrome history reveals that choosing two books took me just under two hours. I decided I’d buy 1 Maths book and another of my own choice, potentially linked to personal growth.

Despite these rules, the abundance of books on offer in both categories, mixed in with the urge of trying to maximise the ‘free’ £15 I was able to spend and also products that would make it in time was difficult. A lot of time went in trying to find a book with a double-digit price that I actually wanted and in looking for the best option, one that potentially I would never be able to find.

Why you shouldn't do it all, apart from because you can't

This activity reminded me of Parkinson’s Law, a time management idea that work always expands to fill the time we set towards it. If you set 3 hours to edit your CV, you can. If you allot a whole day to study 1 topic of Biology, you’ll find a way to. In an exam, you’ll be able to write an essay on the same subject for both 10 minutes and an hour.

It’s very easy to create meaningless and ineffective tasks that inflate a simple task into taking way longer than it deserves. A prime example is making a revision timetable or planning: designing a perfect colour-coded organised structure, all mapped onto Google Calendar with precision to the minute is a mouth-watering thought when really it is just procrastination in disguise. Our primitive minds, trying to preserve energy and reduce the work we have to do, will gladly hang around, doing objectively low-value meta activities that make you feel like you’re making progress but work that doesn’t actually move you towards your goals.

A great infographic from Asana

The solution? Being strict with ourselves and setting time limits, forcing us to be creative and come up with a solution. Creating self-imposed deadlines ensures the work takes no longer than it realistically should and means you can move on to the next task on time.

Doing this also gives way to the useful exercise of estimating how long completing a certain activity will really take. As my dad likes to say, we are guilty of overestimating our abilities and underestimating how long a certain task will take so taking the time to predict how long something will take could be a signal that delegation or prioritisation is needed, for example.

I was criticised for this yesterday by friends when we were out for a birthday outing in Birmingham. Having gone back and forth on where to go for lunch, an exasperated friend of us four said “For Adi, he has to weigh up all the options, consider the advantages and disadvantages, then make a decision as to which is the best place to go”. Guilty as charged. (In the end, I tried some Vietnamese phở which was very flavoursome and filling - not a bad outcome, in spite of short-circuiting the decision-making process)

Life is composed of far too many decisions to be hung up on them and too many tasks to let any overstay their due deserved duration. Deadlines can be a problem if they are too generous - protect your time by bringing them forward.

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Book of the week 📖

After an unproductive afternoon, I snuggled up in bed and got through ~200 pages of The Thursday Murder Club in one go, getting to the bottom of the puzzle (pun intended). Really enjoyed this fantastic murder (or three!) mystery novel, getting immersed into the characters and the story playing out like a movie in my head.

Podcast of the week🎙️

Gresham College Lectures: Defeating Digital Viruses: Lessons From the Pandemic

Of the little I played through my headphones this week, this one was interesting, particularly reflecting on the language we use to describe cybercrime.

Article of the week 📰

Quantum breakthrough could revolutionise computing

Quantum computing could be the next big thing after the current generative AI boom, here’s a good introductory piece about it.

Quote of the week 💬

Learn to say 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the best. John C Maxwell

If you’re on holiday this week, I hope you can make the most of your time, remembering our good (British) friend Cyril Northcote Parkinson,

Adi