The Hyper-Optimizer of Time

The Hyper-Optimizer of Time

May 21, 2009 - my last entry… quite a bit of sand has flowed through the hourglasses. The arrival of a small being in my life changed a lot, but slowly :) I’m returning to the world of the living. To start off, here’s my first post after the break.

Time management seems like an exhausted topic where there’s not much left to add, as everything has already been said or written. While it’s indeed hard to add anything new, the more important question is - what can we subtract, following the principle, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

One of the main afflictions of modern civilization is the sheer abundance of choice, countless options, competition, and dozens of sources of information. What effect does this have? Information overload, decision fatigue, which causes the value of information to fade:

• What is worth reading?
• What is worth learning?
• What should we know?
• What deserves even a second of our lives?

Once (ten years ago) I was able to immerse myself in a few music albums throughout the year. I knew them well, could recite the lyrics by heart, and they held genuine value for me. Not long after, I could afford to buy several albums a month, and what was the effect? I didn’t even listen to 80% of them, and none connected with me as deeply as before.

We are bombarded with information and tasks to complete, and the fragments destroy our resources of free time. Therefore, the main challenge is not at all:

• optimizing our available time,
• gaining greater control over tasks and their predictability,
• being aware of how we use our time,
• and other attributes of well-managed time.

The challenge is the skill of identifying what truly matters from all the potential information and tasks. Honestly, I’ve often heard about the Pareto Principle 80/20 (where 20% of our actions generate 80% of the results), and I even thought I applied it to my life. I even taught it myself! But now I see that my understanding wasn’t deep. It involved superficially applying techniques to organize tasks. However, I’m now starting to grasp its much deeper meaning. The Pareto Principle teaches us the art of selection through skillful elimination. Time management isn’t about cramming as many tasks as possible into the shortest amount of time. Time management should be about doing important things!

Quite a cliché, isn’t it? But let’s look at it from another angle. How often do you consider whether what you’ve done recently (day, week, month) was important? What could you abandon and be no worse off? What could you do less of? Did you have to or should you have done it yourself? Yes, here’s the hidden secret of lost time. For the past few weeks, I’ve been conducting such analyses and with great astonishment, I find that 30-50% of the tasks I performed weren’t worth the amount of energy I dedicated to them. Some tasks I could simply skip or delay; instead of performing them at 130%, I could do them at 105%. I could have done most tasks much more simply, spent much less time in meetings. Drawing such conclusions is true hyper-learning. Let me tell you something more, despite this awareness - every week, I still find that 30-50% of tasks didn’t need to be done that way. Enormous knowledge and experience in time management, using task organizing techniques, planning, calendars, and reminders aren’t enough. The most important, yet also the most challenging skill is the art of elimination. To learn it, you must ask yourself a profound question: “What is truly important to me?” … But that’s another story…

(Text translated and moved from original old blog automatically by AI. May contain inaccuracies.)