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Lumifer comments on Abuse of Productivity Systems - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, kinda. As this thread (among other things) makes clear, managing time and managing motivation are different things. Technically speaking, calling managing your motivation "time management" is a misuse of the term.
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.
Yes, insofar what makes a term meaningful is its uselfulness for communication :-) But your point is valid, "time management" is basically the management of your own attention and effort.
I would guess that the real problem here is the fear of not choosing correctly. (Which ironically leads to choosing even worse.) Fear indeed is the mind-killer, or at least a motivation-killer for mental tasks.
I imagine that a possible approach could be to limit the time when you are making the choice. For example, on Sunday you would decide what are you going to do the following week, and precommit that you will not change your decision during the week. Then, during the week it would be obvious what to do. And if you remember something else, just write it into a diary and review it on the next Sunday.
The idea is that you would only commit to the direction of your work, not the amount of the work you want to do. If you feel tired, take a rest. Don't push yourself into anything. It's just, don't longer ask yourself "Haskell or type theory", because you have already answered that for the whole week.
I think you are absolutely spot on. Fear is a key to many failures of human behavior, and I want to think more about that.
Interestingly, many time management systems like Zen to Done and Do It Tomorrow do set up a form of commitments for a day or for a week. ZTD has:
Do It Tomorrow has a concept of a closed list in contrast to a todo-list. Every time you go to sleep you compile a list of tasks for tomorrow that you absolutely definitely gonna do. It's realistic to expect yourself to not succeed at too many things, so your closed list might contain only one task. But the fact is, you do only things on the closed list, and not add anything on top of it.
The idea of setting up a commitment for a day, or a commitment for a week, sounds sorta like applying the concept of Pomodoro for a larger time frame. During Pomodoro you aren't allowed to not do the task at hand (which implies you aren't allowed being distracted), and here you aren't allowed to not do what you already planned for a week.