/memento

A personal approach to controlling rogue time

Memento

A personal approach to controlling rogue time.

Qoute

“Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The cops don’t catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts, they make notes and they draw conclusions. Facts, not memory.”

Leonard Shelby

Demo

Definitions

  • Time can divide into three era: past, present and future.
  • But era is more rebel that we can imagine. So we should trap it in more short-period boundaries. I call those boundaries: TimeBoxes
  • From this point you just see timeboxes. There are no opaque words like past, present and future.
  • Every timebox has only one StartPoint and only one EndPoint.
  • In any timebox, you define at least one Goal.
  • Goals can consist of: Routines or Jobs or both of them.
    • A Job consist of at least one Task.
  • Jobs, tasks, routines also have a time boundary.(startpoint and endpoint.)
  • Every timebox has at least one Outcome.
  • Every job/routine has only one outcome.
  • Outcome is a number between 0% - 100%.
  • Routines/jobs/tasks should have Priorities.
  • The steps that you follow to do a specific routine or job are called: Recipe.
    • Recipes can be shared by people.
  • In every moment, you should be in a timebox.
  • TimeBoxes don't overlap with each other.
  • Timebox duration is up to you. It can be one hour, one day, one week, two weeks, one month, one year, etc..
  • You can Chain timeboxes as long as you have goals for every timebox.
  • Past are just collection of timeboxes that their lifetime were finished. (Look at it as a treasure or a way to be more productive in the Present/Future era.)
  • Experiences are the outcome of timeboxes that their endpoints are less than current time.
  • Plans are timeboxes that their startpoint are greater than current time.
    • If you can’t define at least one timebox, don't plan!
  • But time is not always manageable.
  • You can get sick. There may be an earthquake in your city. Or any other accidents that are beyond your control. How deal with them?
  • We call these unpredictable accidents: Events.
  • So you should have Buffers in your timeboxes to deal with events.
  • You should define goals for your buffers. If no event occurred, follow them.
  • Assign a portion of every timebox for buffers.(something between 5% and 20% is reasonable)

How use this approach?

The simplest way is to write your own recipes/timeboxes on a paper and start following them :) To help you get the idea, i included a simple recipe in this repo.

But the better way is to transform this approach to a software. So if you're a programmer, you're free to implement this specification in any kind of software form that you like. (A library, an android app, a desktop app, etc..)

Keywords

  • TimeBox
  • Goal
  • Routine
  • Job
  • Task
  • Outcome
  • Priorities
  • Recipe
  • Experiences
  • Plans

Contribution

  • If you have any idea to improve this approach, please let me know :)
  • Also you can share your recipes with other people. Just create a PR for each recipe.

Diagram

timebox