Thursday, July 7th, 2011, 6:53 pm
Improving Time Management by Utilising Idle Time
hen I was about 20 I wrote down some efficiency tips that I realised I had adopted (very out of date and potentially embarrassing, going back to the days of static-only pages in this Web site). I can look back at my teenage years and recall being bored and dissatisfied with some of the ways I was passing time. This mostly improved when I started my Ph.D. and derived influence from my boss.
While making a lot of time for exercise and enough time for sleep and social life, I do always try to maximise use of my work time. In particular, here are ways to combine work and boring chores. I typically read papers while I shave, as the latter task is mostly mechanical (shaver, no blades), I listen to music/lectures while preparing to leave or showering, typically audiocasts while doing jobs around the house, and typing of blog posts (including this one) between sets at the gym, unless friends are nearby, in which case I speak to them. There are good devices with full-sized keyboard that make this possible, especially in particular gyms at quieter times of the day. This leaves a lot of the complex jobs that require multitasking to the desktop, which has a vast workspace, steady Internet connection, and event alerts. This actually helps promote the argument that we decreasingly depend on just the old-style desktop, assuming devices integrate correctly. This always leave me wondering how many aspects of ours lives will depend on Linux (which is huge in embedded and mobile devices, not just the server side). But that’s a ramble for another day…