This issue is a record of and reflection on life in September 2023.
Time Management When You’re Doing Too Much
This issue, by reader request, I’m talking about time management.
Managing time comes down to two basic things:
- Before you work: how you allocate time
- While you work: how you actually use it
Allocating Time: Prioritizing
Everyone has limited energy, but tasks are basically endless — work piles up with things to schedule, and life adds its own assortment of chores. So how do you sensibly arrange your finite time?
Here’s my simple approach: calendar + reminders. Specifically:
- Calendar: for anything with a fixed time that has to happen. This is a block of time committed to a specific Event — meetings, badminton games, dinners out. (The dot-prefixed items in the screenshot below are Events.)
- Reminders: for collecting loose tasks and to-dos. These are individual Things that can be flexibly scheduled based on priority — work tasks, life errands, that sort of thing. (The checkmark-prefixed items below are Things; tick them off once done.)
My setup uses Fantastical, pulling from iCloud’s Apple Calendar and Todoist. I went with Todoist because of its openness and integration support — it plays nicely with Obsidian, Raycast, and other tools. There are plenty of to-do apps out there; use whichever feels right to you.
If you don’t have particular needs, Apple Calendar and Apple Reminders work just fine.
Now, the tools aside — how do you actually allocate time? The flexible part is mostly the Things. A few tips:
- By priority: High-priority and urgent things get done immediately. Lower-priority or life-admin items I batch together in the morning or right before bed.
- By your peak focus window: Figure out when you’re sharpest — late afternoon? evening? — and carve out a solid unbroken block for your harder or more important work.
Of course, new things will land in your lap throughout the day. When something non-urgent comes in, don’t stop what you’re doing — drop it into the Reminders inbox and revisit it at a natural transition point. Then reassess priorities and see if anything needs to move around.
Using Time: Stay Focused, Give It Everything
Time is the great equalizer — everyone gets 24 hours a day. The key is using that time well enough to have energy left over for what matters.
A couple of years ago in my year-end review I admitted I wasn’t great at multitasking. I’ve since made some adjustments, and the core insight is this: spend as much of the day in a focused state as possible, and switch contexts as rarely as possible.
A piece in the New York Times from a few weeks back put it well:
Multitasking is largely a myth. We can only truly focus on one thing at a time. “It’s like we have a mental whiteboard,” says Mark. “If I’m working on one task, my whiteboard is full of everything I need for it. Then I switch to email — I have to erase all of that and rewrite everything I need to write the email. And like a real whiteboard, there’s residue. I might still be thinking about something from three tasks ago.”
Working across multiple things at once drains cognitive resources, disrupts working memory, and makes flow states nearly impossible. That’s why staying focused — minimizing distractions and interruptions — matters so much. Come to think of it, almost everything humanity has achieved in culture and philosophy can be traced back to deep, singular attention. And yet as the age of achievement culture rises, that depth of attention keeps getting pushed aside.
Economics studies how scarce resources are allocated in society. If we replace “social resources” with “personal resources,” the same logic applies. The scarcest things any individual has are time, energy, attention, and focus — spend them on one thing and you can’t spend them on another.
Scarcity makes the point this way:
The human brain is like a road with its own “bandwidth.” When that road gets jammed with something, cognitive resources run dry — you enter a state of cognitive overload with no room to think about anything else.
The upshot: the secret to effectiveness is focus.
I’ve been using Rize, which isn’t just a simple time tracker:
It’s a tool for building focus. If you stay within the same app or work context for a sustained stretch, you enter a Focus state (similar to flow), and it tracks that time. But if you suddenly jump out — say, you open WeChat or browse a website unrelated to what you’re doing — Rize reads that as distraction, shows a focus reminder, and ends the current focus session.
The whole thing is remarkably simple to use — nothing to configure, AI-powered monitoring running entirely in the background, only making itself known when you’re slacking or breaking focus. (Not sponsored, but if you want to try it, you can sign up at https://rize.io?code=291287…)
Of course, no app can substitute for actually doing the work. There are plenty of time management masters out there operating with nothing more than a blank sheet of paper. No amount of methodology beats just getting things done. What determines the value of your time isn’t what tools you have — it’s what you produce.
The question for our time isn’t “what does it return right now?” but “how much will it grow, and what possibilities does it open?” Develop your sense of your own abilities and your relationship with time, and learn to allocate your energy and attention wisely — so that from limited time and resources, you can produce more of what matters.
And there’s no need to be anxious about limited time. Whatever you’re facing, giving it your full effort is its own kind of happiness. Whenever you’re about to do something — big or small, however it ranks in the world’s eyes — throwing yourself into it completely, investing your talent, attention, and time without calculating returns, brings a quiet joy and a sense of self-affirmation from deep inside.
Maybe it’s as The Shape of Time from last issue said:
“Rather than struggling and searching, perhaps it’s better to simply meet it — and maybe in doing so, trace a more beautiful arc of life.”
🌺 Snippets from Life
A few moments from the month.
🔨 The Engineer Who Does Everything
Since switching roles I’ve been touching everything — essentially full-stack at this point. My daily deep-dives into rendering keep getting deeper; I’ll get stuck on a small problem for two or three days, and then feel completely triumphant when I crack it.
Since then, my mood and outlook have kept improving.
📱 iPhone 15 Pro
Got a new phone. Honestly can’t tell much difference =.=
🐬 Off-Peak Vacation
Took a Friday off the week before National Day to make a three-day mini-break, and went to Chimelong for the day.
🌇 Sunset
Walking back to my desk after dinner one evening and catching this sunset.
🎬 Books, Films, and More
Here’s what I’ve been reading, watching, and playing recently:
- Currently reading: Philosophy | How to Read Das Kapital | ★★★★★
- Finished: Fiction | Human Extinction | ★★★★☆
- Finished: Film | Oppenheimer | ★★★★☆
- Finished: Film | No More Bets | ★★★★☆
- Finished: Film | Creation of the Gods I | ★★★★☆
- Finished: Film | San Andreas | ★★★☆☆
- Finished: Film | Transformers: Rise of the Beasts | ★★☆☆☆
- Currently watching: Anime | Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 | ★★★★★
- Finished: Anime | Jujutsu Kaisen | ★★★★★
- Finished: Anime | Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood | ★★★★★
- Currently watching: K-drama | Moving | ★★★★☆
- Finished: J-drama | VIVANT | ★★★☆☆
- Finished: Historical drama | Mysterious Lotus Casebook | ★★★☆☆
- Finished: Modern drama | Pretend Lovers | ★★★★☆
- Finished: Documentary | Planet Earth II | ★★★★★
- Currently playing: Switch | The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | ★★★★★
- Currently playing: Steam | Forza Horizon 5 | ★★★★★
Just got obsessed with Gojo Satoru from anime — and then the manga killed him the very next day… Anyway, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood truly earns its legendary status.
One small announcement: I’ve set up a Telegram channel, using a bot and webhook to build a kind of activity feed. Whenever I publish a new monthly post, blog article, or save a bookmark or article, the bot automatically posts a notification to the channel. If that sounds interesting, feel free to subscribe: https://t.me/airingchannel.
