Limiting Work To Capacity, Part 2

The first step in measuring my capacity was figuring out what not to measure. It didn’t make sense to measure things I couldn’t change. Starting with a 24-hour day (or more usefully at 168-hour week) and then subtracting out time for sleeping, meals, driving, and other sundry tasks would imply that those were subject to my control, i.e. that I could choose to spend less time on them. So I what did was identify those things that made up what I think of as the “framework” of my day. For me, that’s sleep, work, and meals (though there will be more on that last item later). I made a conscious decision not to measure them but treat them as given. Instead, I decided to measure things that were different from day to day and I did for some sort of reason.

The next step was deciding what things were big enough to bother measuring. I knew that if I decided to measure things that were too small, I would (a) get overwhelmed by details, and (b) spend more on measurement – and fine-tuning my system – than on getting things done. I knew I wouldn’t get as much return out of the time spent analyzing things that were too short, so I decided to focus on tasks that took up at least a certain minimum amount of time. This is where I made a somewhat arbitrary decision, but one that worked for me: I was only going to measure things that took at least thirty minutes at a time.1

Step three was determining how to track my time. I already used a daily to-do list to track what what I was going to do, so I just decided to annotate this with how I spent on each task during the day.2 Easy peasy, as they say, which made it likely I’d be able to do it.

Today’s to-do list, with semi-intelligible time tracking information.

They also say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating3, and it turned that eating was about as easy as I thought. I’ve been logging this data since December, with only minor tweaks to the process along the way. What did I do with that data? You’ll have to come back for Part 3 to find out.

1This was mostly due to my previous experience with the Pomodoro Technique, which already had me thinking about time in half-hour chunks.4

2 Again, basic Pomodoro stuff, though there’s some philosophical differences between this and the Pomodoro Technique. I was less concerned about the flow states that a continuous stream of Pomodoros gives you and more about chunking my time into boxes to measure it.

3 The proof is not, contrary to popular opinion, in the pudding.

4 I’ve actually switched to breaking down things that are less than one hour into 15-minute chunks, with a bias towards half-hours, but that’s a later refinement.