Is “time management” even a meaningful term? You can't manage time after all, it just flows. You can manage your focus and your actions and spend them more effectively, given allotted time. Mark Forster in a productivity book Do It Tomorrow says that we should call it “attention management” instead. It sounds like a stupid argument about semantics, but there's a point.

Most of the time I'm not that demotivated that I only want to binge watch TV series. Most of the time I feel like I want to do something productive. But there are multitude of things that “I could be doing” in my mind at the same time. I could continue polishing my Haskell skills, or maybe I should go back to theory and revise my knowledge of algorithms, or maybe I should go back to theoretical computer science and fix the holes in my understanding of complexity, computation, type theory and what not, or maybe I should go to StackOverflow and answer someone's question, or maybe I should practice how to use Emacs more efficiently, or maybe I should start writing a video game to improve practical programming skills, or...

Instead of doing any of those things, and it's obvious I can only do one thing at a time, I spend all day browsing StackOverflow, Facebook, MIRI's website, checking email and RSS.

What I should do instead is take one and only one task, turn on my pomodoro and spend 50 minutes doing nothing else than that.