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bgaesop comments on Teachable Rationality Skills - Less Wrong
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Skill: An accurate and functional awareness of time.
By this I mean to include noticing that pre-established dates and times have arrived, predicting the amount of time things will take you or other people, not carrying through with schedules or plans inflexibly when real surprises should cause updates, understanding how to effectively communicate about time with people about time management in ways that respect the listener's time management skills, and so on.
Suggested exercise: guess what time it is, then check a clock. Guess how long it's been since you last checked the clock, ie not only "it is 4:30" but also "it is 35 minutes since I last checked the time (at 3:55)"
I've found my time-keeping accuracy went up a lot when I started thinking in those terms. I can also often get within 15 minutes of the time by simply estimating how much time I spent on activities since I last checked the clock.
i.e.: "I checked the clock at noon. Then I had to handle that big, complex situation, which probably took an hour. I probably spent ~20 minutes taking a break afterwards so I could be more productive. Then I wrote a couple quick pieces of code, call it 15 minutes each, so 30 minutes. I suppose it's probably 1:50 PM"
This does take a bit more than 5 minutes if I haven't cached anything for a long time, but I can now treat "1:50 PM" as a "checked the clock" and extrapolate off that cached value. Generally I'm only wrong if I've completely forgotten about something else I did ("Oh, right, I had that 30 minute meeting! It's actually 2:20 PM"). Doing this often has gotten me in to the habit of tracking my time, which has the added benefit that I can generally figure out where my time went =)
I'm very good at that, but very bad at being on time.
Same here.