A couple years ago I started having a biweekly coffee hour open to everyone in our program. It came out of a couple prior experiences with our seminars where the intended presented no-showed, but the conversation we had in the meantime ended up spawning some really great discussion—so these regular coffee hours were an attempt to preserve that dynamic.
A few weeks ago during one those coffee hours, one of the attendees commented on what must be my “extraordinary” time management skills—which, first and foremost, is a testament to how I apparently look like I’m managing my time decently even when it certainly never feels like that’s the case. But I shared a handful of the strategies that I use, and while I’m sure none of them are truly original to me, they were relatively novel to those in attendance.
Since then, I’ve repeated quite a few of them in other conversations. My stated purpose for this blog was to have somewhere to put thoughts that I find myself repeating relatively frequently so that I can just link to a more thorough version of those thoughts, so I’m going to share some of those strategies here as well.
Though let’s be honest: if there wasn’t an excuse to call this “Quantum Time Management”, I probably wouldn’t bother to write this down. I’m a sucker for a catchy title.
Strategy #1: The Daily Bookmarks
As part of my role teaching several classes, there are a large number of forums I like to check daily to see what’s going on, if there are any unanswered questions or simmering crises, any opportunities to build on an interesting discussion topic, etc. For a long time, though, the challenge I often found was that this task is far and away the easiest take to have fall off during busy times: I have phenomenal TAs dedicated to monitoring the forums, so nothing breaks if I don’t check in for a couple days, and during the busiest times of year it’s hard to make time for anything that won’t break if you don’t do it.
In addition, there are a number of tasks I need to do on a daily basis for all my classes. I have announcements to post, scripts to run to synchronize gradebooks between different platforms, and scripts to handle a few more routine tasks, like unpinning old threads on my forums or cross-posting announcements from email to Canvas. Some of these could be scheduled, but I feel better when I remain as the trigger for these actions: it lets me make last-minute tweaks, verify certain things are appearing correctly or timed appropriately, and react appropriately to recent developments. These, too, are easy to lose track of when times get busy—when I first started synchronizing gradebooks via edX and Canvas for my undergraduate class, for instance, I intended to do it weekly… but it ended up happening monthly or even more rarely.
That is, until I created a routine for myself based around a pretty simple little browser feature—the Open All in Tabs feature. I’ve now got a daily routine where the very first thing I do each day—before opening email, Teams, or Slack, before looking at my to-do list, before anything can distract me—is open all my daily bookmarks in tabs and go through them one by one. Over time, there have grown to be quite a few of them:
The titles don’t matter, of course: what matters is that they’re all open, and they each remain open until I look at it and make sure I’m comfortable with it for the day. For course forums, that means filtering by unresolved posts and making sure everything is resolved, as well as checking out some of the recent threads for places I can contribute. For program forums, that mostly means checking out the latest activity. Recently I’ve even added regular approvals to this workflow that I had a tendency to overlook otherwise: it takes all of 3 seconds per day to glance at spend approvals or absence requests if there aren’t any new ones, but that 3 seconds prevents them from sitting unacknowledged for days based on the finicky email notification systems.
Until recently, I even launched my daily scripts from this bookmark folder: I don’t actually know what happened, but until two weeks ago, launching a bookmark to a Python script in Firefox would run that script. Starting two weeks ago, it instead just opens it in plaintext, but now I still use that as a reminder to myself for which scripts need to run each day.
The upshot of all of this is that I’m far more in touch with my classes than before developing this routine, and far fewer things fall through the cracks if they fall into predictable buckets.
There’s still a lot of room for improvement, granted. I still have a remarkable love-hate relationship with Slack chat: it’s usually the next thing I check after my daily bookmarks, but there’s such a strong tendency for things to get overlooked there that I feel I constantly have dozens of things waiting on me. Honestly, I think a lot of that is a product of our tendency to use Slack for tasks that are still better suited for email, but that might just be me shouting at clouds.
Strategy #2: The Pre-Prioritized To-Do List
Like most people, I’ve kept a personal to-do list for years. For a long time it was just a .txt file synced across several devices until I switched over to using Google Keep a couple years ago. Even then, though, it wasn’t really a tool for time management; it was really just a tool for making sure I didn’t forget important things.
About nine months ago, though, I tweaked how I handle my to-do list a little bit. I noticed that I often got myself in a rut of being unable to decide what to do next; and in the absence of a decision on what to do next, I ended up just clicking back and forth between Slack and email for a long time, keeping on top of those things but struggling to make progress on any real larger tasks. A big part of that was that I would get stuck on tasks I didn’t want to do at the moment it was time to decide to do them; or, I would get stuck between a high-priority unpleasant task and a low-priority pleasant one.
To address that, I separated out the process of prioritizing my to-do list from actually working through the items on it. After checking my daily bookmarks and checking in on Slack and Teams, the next thing I try to do (keyword: try; if I know I’m expecting something via email, that often takes precedence) is look at my to-do list and prioritize the tasks on it—primarily by importance, but also to an extent by time required. The effect of that is that it removes the decisions on what to do next later in the day: what to do next is always just the next task on the list. And because the decision on priority occurs separately from actually starting the task, it’s not as difficult to prioritize an unpleasant task; then when it comes time to move on to that task, it’s easier to get started because it doesn’t feel as if starting that task is a decision. It’s simply the next thing on the list.
I’ve tried looking into some more sophisticated management tools, but so far I’ve found the time required to get them setup is too much friction for the value I think I would discern: but a simple to-do list (which always has a home on my bottom-left monitor so it’s hard to ignore it) with easy prioritization that syncs to my phone has paid some pretty big dividends.
Strategy #3: Separating Email Filtering from Email Answering
I’ve joked in the past that really, my job is professional email answerer. I spend a lot of time answering email. For a long time I followed the common practice of leaving messages marked ‘unread’ until they were addressed, but the challenge there—similar to to-do list priority—was that it grouped all as-yet-unaddressed emails together under one label, whether they were things I could not reply to yet, needed more time to reply to, or simply weren’t time-sensitive. As a result, I’d often find myself inadvertently taking way too long to respond to an email even as I responded to several less-important ones far faster because they were simply easier.
Part of my email workflow as well is that I have a lot of Quicktext templates for routine messages, but as yet I haven’t found an easy way to carry those over to my phone or laptop (a Chromebook); Thunderbird is my email tool of choice where I answer 95% of my messages, but that similarly leaves me without some tools I use regularly if I’m on the go. That, then, led me to my lists of unread messages to continue to pile up with things I simply can’t address away from my desktop, but routine messages that can be addressed via a Quicktext reply then get grouped in with emails that require longer, more thoughtful responses.
When I went to Japan last spring, I knew I couldn’t just check out of email for a week, but I knew there were going to be lots of things that either weren’t time sensitive or that would be hard to answer from my laptop. So, I set up a scheme where I’d filter all my incoming email into three folders: an ASAP folder, a Today folder, and a This Week folder. ASAP were messages that either (a) were truly time sensitive and needed to be addressed as soon as I could, or (b) messages that I knew would take <30 seconds to answer once I was on the right platform. Today messages were those that needed a response within 24 hours or so, but were not so time sensitive that they needed to take priority over my to-do list. This Week were those messages that needed a reply, but could wait until I had time; there was little time-sensitive about these at all.
What I discovered in this process, though, was that there was a cognitive benefit to separating out sorting my email from responding to my email. Sorting was a task that typically could exist in a predictable time scale: if I open email and see 30 unread messages, I know that it will probably take about 5 minutes to sort them into their respective folders. Typically, most won’t require any reply, then a handful will go into each of the above folders. At the end of that, I have in the back of my mind how much time I’ll need to spend on email in the near future. It’s no longer a lurking unknown quantity of work. Plus, for those emails that are going to require some extra thought, it goes ahead and sticks them in the back of my mind to brainstorm while doing other things.
Once I’ve done that for the day, I feel as if I at least have wrapped my head around email for the day. Sometimes I’ll check again later in the day, but not always: I don’t feel like it’s reasonable to expect all emails to be read in under 24 hours, and so once I’ve done this once for a day, I feel I’ve wrapped my mind around what fraction of my day email is going to command. That tends to be less frustrating than getting through half the day and feel like all I’ve done is answer email because I didn’t have a priority structure, or getting to the end of the day only to find an email avalanche waiting before I can sign off.
There are a handful of other tricks I use for email in general—I have an automated filter for moving messages from “priority senders” into a dedicated folder so I’m more likely to see time-sensitive emails faster, and I often schedule my replies to non-time sensitive emails to go out a few hours later so that the replies to my replies don’t pile up before I’m even done getting through my initial pile. I also have separate filters to move anything sent to a mailing list, anything sent via an automated platform, or anything with an ‘unsubscribe’ link to separate folders since those are unlikely to be as time sensitive. But separating prioritizing email and answering email has been the biggest improvement to my overall relationship with email.
Strategy #4: The Daily and Weekly Task Checklist
This strategy actually preceded my daily bookmarks folder, and it’s what gave rise to that idea, but it has some merits of its own separate from that routine. A couple years ago, I became quite uncomfortable with the realization that sometimes, I myself didn’t even know how far behind I was on email or course forums or various other tasks that are meant to be maintained regularly. So, I created a simple spreadsheet—which now lives in Google Docs in the tab alongside my to-do list—with columns corresponding to various tasks. Each day, I mark off which of those I did during that day. At the start, the tasks were: checking each course forum; checking each MOOC forum; responding to all messages in my priority senders folder; and reaching Inbox 0 in my main folder.
The intent of this wasn’t to create a pressure to actually do all of those things each day; instead, it was just meant to build up a sense of pressure if it had been a while since any were done—or, conversely, to instill a sense of accomplishment when they all were done. What I found was that after a few busy days where I didn’t touch base on my course forums, for instance, in the back of my mind the forum was always something I was behind on. There was no “inbox 0” for the forums because at the time, we didn’t heavily emphasize what it meant for a thread to be “resolved”. As such, it never really felt like I was “caught up” after falling behind, and that just made it even harder to check in because it felt like a much bigger task than it was. Keeping track of how long it had been created an “inbox 0”-type feeling for it, knowing that only a day or two had passed since last time I had a full handle over everything that was going on—or, conversely, it created an appropriate “inbox 999+” feeling if it had been a few days.
What I found over time, though, was that keeping track of that unsurprisingly made it easier to actually accomplish those things each day. Knowing “I’ve checked in on the forum 10 workdays in a row” meant (a) I know that it’s unlikely it’s going to take a lot of time today because not much new can happen in 24 hours—or if it does take a while, it’s because it should because something big happened that I don’t want to let simmer—and (b) I want to keep my streak going! Looking back now, the only times in the past year and a half since I started this system that I haven’t checked in on my course forums were during conferences, during vacations, and between semesters.
Since starting this at the beginning of 2023, I’ve added other things that I track, as well as some additional nuances. For example, rather than just a boolean assessment of whether I reached Inbox 0, I track for each day whether I (a) ignored email altogether, (b) filtered all that day’s new emails, and (c) answered all the emails in that day ASAP, Today, and This Week folders. I’ve also added a separate tab for tasks that are only done weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and so on; that latter one was spawned by an expensive HVAC repair after discovering I hadn’t been replacing air filters nearly regularly enough.
The entire point of all of these exercises is to take certain things that tend to linger in the back of my mind—”oh, I need to remember to change the fish tank filter this week”; “dang, how long has it been since I reached inbox 0”, etc.—and externalize them so they no longer have feel like unknown lurking vague obligations. Instead, they’re clear, objective, and referenceable.
Strategy #5: Quantum Time Management
Finally, the strategy that gave this blog post its title: quantum time management is a fun name for a really simple solution I’ve found to decision paralysis. Any time I find myself spending more than a couple minutes struggling to make a decision, I just leave it up to chance. I’ve decided the time saved by not agonizing over it anymore is, on average, going to be more valuable than a slight improvement in the actual decision if I spent more time considering. Most often, I use this strategy when I have multiple to-do list items that really could exist in any order: I find that rather than think about how to prioritize them, I might as well just leave them to chance. The time saved will probably let me accomplish both anyway, while thinking about it more would leave me only enough time to accomplish one. I’ve also used it to pick what book to read next, what game to play next, where to order from GrubHub, etc.
Why is that “quantum” time management, though? Because the specific RNG I use is qrandom.io, which provides an API to access the result of quantum measurements as the seed. Does it really matter that much? No; but it’s fun to me to think that under one interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are lots of other Davids out there living slightly different lives because every time I went to make a decision, the universe split into several sub-universes each with a different choice for me. But ultimately, the value is simply that by leaving it up to chance, I save myself both the time and decision-fatigue that would come from forcing myself to choose.
Room for Improvement
There’s still a ton of room for improvement in my time management, though, and if anyone has any suggested strategies, I’d love to hear. I still often find myself caught up in a loop between Slack, Teams, and email if it’s a busy day, keeping on top of all three but unable to push myself into starting more focused work if I’m worried about getting interrupted by something time sensitive in one of these other areas. Replies to Slack threads especially are my nemesis: if I’m not mentioned or a Slack thread reply isn’t sent to the channel, I’ll miss it for weeks regardless of how important it is. (But I put the blame for that on Slack.)
While I’ve wrapped my routine around repeated daily tasks, I struggle a bit with tasks that are repeated but on odd cadences; I’m often caught off guard by tasks that are done once per semester, for instance, because they aren’t routine enough to incorporate into a separate list or schedule, but they are so routine that it doesn’t strike me to add them to my to-do list far in advance. I’d love it if Google Keep had a feature for augmenting list items with dates on which they would appear so that we can go ahead and note them well in advance, but keep them out of sight until they’re needed; I imagine another platform might handle this, but that feature hopefully would not radically increase the complexity of the interaction since a bit more friction might stop me from using the tool at all.
I also have a bad habit of operating as an “event-driven” program when dealing with certain emails: I send a message off, knowing that the reply I get from the recipient is the “event” to trigger me to do something else, and that until I receive that event the task is off my list. Then, if I never receive a reply, the task just stagnates, even if someone else was waiting on me. Outlook has some features to address this, but as far as I’ve seen, they only work if you deliberately mark each email with a note for when to remind yourself; when this only is helpful for <5% of email it’s hard to keep up the motivation to use that feature.
For all the things we’ve designed AI agents to help with, it surprises me that there’s not a more sophisticated AI email assistant out there. I have no doubt that it would be pretty easy for an AI to prioritize my email for me with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Regardless though, I imagine there will always be room for improvement here: these are just some of the strategies I’ve found useful the last several months as life has gotten endlessly busier.