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Week Management

I've been polishing a week reviewing and planning method that suits my needs. I usually follow it on Wednesdays, as I'm too busy on Mondays and Tuesdays and it gives enough time to plan the weekend.

Week review⚑

Life logging is the only purpose of my weekly review.

I've made diw a small python script that for each overdue task allows me to:

  • Review: Opens vim to write a diary entry related with the task. The text is saved as an annotation of the task and another form is filled to record whom I've shared it with. The last information is used to help me take care of people around me.
  • Skip: Don't interact with this task.
  • Done: Complete the task.
  • Delete: Remove the task.
  • Reschedule: Opens a form to specify the new due date.

Week planning⚑

The purpose of the planning is to make sure that I know what I need to do and arrange all tasks in a way that allows me not to explode.

First I empty the INBOX file, refactoring all the information in the other knowledge sinks. It's the place to go to quickly gather information, such as movie/book/serie recommendations, human arrangements, miscellaneous thoughts or tasks. This file lives in my mobile. I edit it with Markor and transfer it to my computer with Share via HTTP.

Taking different actions to each INBOX element type:

  • Tasks or human arrangements: Do it if it can be completed in less than 3 minutes. Otherwise, create a taskwarrior task.
  • Behavior: Add it to taskwarrior.
  • Movie/Serie recommendation: Introduce it into my media monitorization system.
  • Book recommendation: Introduce into my library management system.
  • Miscellaneous thoughts: Refactor into the blue-book, project documentation or Anki.

Then I split my workspace in two terminals, in the first I run task due.before:7d diary where diary is a taskwarrior report that shows pending tasks that are not in the backlog sorted by due date. On the other I:

  • Execute gcal . to show the calendar of the previous, current and next month.
  • Check the weather for the whole week to decide which plans are suitable.
  • Analyze the tasks that need to be done answering the following questions:
  • Do I need to do this task this week? If not, reschedule or delete it.
  • Does it need a due date? If not, remove the due attribute. Having the minimum number of tasks with a fixed date reduces wasted rescheduling time and allows better prioritizing.
  • Can I do the task on the selected date? As most humans, I tend to underestimate both the required time to complete a task and to switch contexts. To avoid it, If the day is full it's better to reschedule.
  • Check that every day has at least one task. Particularly tasks that will help with life logging.
  • If there aren't enough things to fill up all days, check the things that I want to do list and try to do one.