(What is RSS?)Oct 14: Last two months I have been engrossed with work. But, at the same time, I have stopped planning altogether recently. “Failing to plan is planning to fail” is very true.
Want to get back on planning. I have started using software calendar to manage my time. It is helpful. I want to use it regularly. It is a good tool to implement my strategy of double it time.
I have shown some improvement over the last few weeks. I feel less stressed. I need to keep trying.
I constantly notice that when I plan or estimate I am utterly optimistic and say to myself a particular task has to be done within x hours. It gives a lot of satisfaction as it makes the plan look better. In reality, the task would take its own time! This keeps repeating and I am still finding it difficult to come up with a plan that might look bad but that is close to real world.
I think I need to learn two things. The first thing to learn is that “allowing more time is not all that bad” and doesn’t mean intentional wasteage of time because, in reality, I ,anyway, waste a lot of time! Second thing to learn is “to be more patient with results when things go wrong”.
So, I am going to use a liberal strategy and see I can learn those two things:
“Just double the number of hours in the final estimate without guilt.”
Try this strategy for next 3 weeks.
Update on July 14: Didn’t try that much.
Update on July 21: Tried a bit. Actually, this seems to help reduce stress.
Update on July 28:
My calendar has a lot of red-entries ( meaning they are past due ). I have been under-estimating the efforts ( implying time) needed and set hard to achieve deadlines. I know estimating time required for tasks is a difficult skill and it takes experience. But it is an essential skill in life to improve your productivity. 100% is impossible because it would require considering so many factors and require so much time to estimate. A skilled manager with several years experience would get 80%-90% ( a rough guess ). If I can get my estimates right 51% (simple majority) of the time (i.e, get the tasks finished within time), I would consider this goal done.
