Time management is not actually about managing time, as time cannot be controlled. Rather, it is about mental management and maintaining motivation. The key principles involve understanding limitations on mental capacity, managing stress levels, and aligning expectations. Productivity is optimized by focusing on one task at a time, breaking work into smaller pieces, and setting up systems to reduce mental workload. Flow state, where a person is fully immersed in an activity, can be achieved by setting clear and achievable goals with timely feedback.

1. Time management is not about time

2. Agenda
● Why time management?
● Time management is not about time
● Feeling overwhelmed - rules of mental management
● Feeling demotivated - rules of motivation
● Putting it all together - planning hierarchy
● Putting it all together - flow state
● Conclusions

3. What is time management
Definition, courtesy Google:
“Time management” is the process of organizing and planning how to divide your time
between specific activities.
It consists of:
● Planning
● Execution

4. Why time management - The problems
● I want to focus on this but other unplanned tasks keep coming up and my original
plan keeps changing
● I don't feel like I have done enough
● I keep having feeling that I should do task B while I'm doing task A
● I don't feel like doing this task, it is a PITA
● I feel overwhelmed with the tasks given to me.

5. Time management is about mental management
● The goal of time management is to have high productivity and feeling good doing
it.
● It has little to do with time. Time can't be managed, each of us has the same
amount of time, we can't stretch them, can't shrink them. We have no control over
time. It just flows.
● It is actually about mental management: attention management, motivation
management, emotional management.

6. Agenda
● Why time management?
● Time management is not about time
● Feeling overwhelmed - 3 rules of mental management
● Feeling demotivated - 3 rules of motivation
● Putting it all together - planning hierarchy
● Putting it all together - flow state
● Conclusions

7. Feeling overwhelmed - the rules of mental management
Main causes of this feeling:
● Don't know how to manage mental limitation - rule of limitation
● Taking more responsibilities than one can cope with - rule of stress/pressure
● Things never go according to my plan - wrong expectation. Rule of expectation.

8. The 3 rules of mental management
● Rule of limitation: We have limits on our information processing and attention
capabilities.
● Rule of stress/pressure:
○ Stress/pressure comes from commitments.
○ Optimal performance is achieved at a certain range of stress/pressure
● Rule of expectation: All of our feeling, positive or negative, comes from how
reality (or our predicted reality) matches up with our expectations. We feel good
when it matches or exceeds our expectations and feel bad otherwise.

9. The rule of limitation
We have limits on our information processing and attention
capabilities.
The rule is simple but has lots of application, e.g. in software development, UX design,
etc.

10. The rule of limitation

11. The rule of limitation
● Our mental RAM is severely limited
● It takes time to load/unload information into/from this RAM
● It works best when we focus 100% without distraction

12. The rule of limitation
Suggestions:
● One thing at a time: planning and execution shouldn’t be done at the same time
● Having a trusted place to dump information into: notes, tasks, concerns, etc. and
review it regularly. Example: Keeping a journal
● Break task down to smaller tasks
● Automate stuff that is not worth loading into mental RAM
● Setting up a flow/checklist that we trust
● Analogy: How to carry heavy stuff -> break it down, use leveraging tools, or ask
someone to help

13. The rule of stress/pressure

14. The rule of stress/pressure

15. The rule of stress/pressure
● Stress/pressure comes from commitments → Reduce/increase number of
commitments
● Commitments come from others as well as ourselves. When we plan, we are
actually setting up commitments to ourselves.
● Reducing number of commitments: learn to say No or delegate
● Increasing number of commitments: artificial deadline (Pomodoro technique)

16. The rule of expectation
All of our feeling, positive or negative, comes from how reality (or our predicted
reality) matches up with our expectations. We feel good when it matches or exceeds
our expectations and feel bad otherwise.

17. The rule of expectation
Reality is that things never go according to plan, so don't expect it to follow your plan.
Expect nothing and prepare for everything.

18. The rule of expectation
Suggestion:
● Whenever we feel bad, pause and think: “What expectation has been violated? Did
I set the wrong expectation.”
● Don’t label something as good or bad. Remember the story of “Tái ông mất ngựa –
塞翁失马”
“There's just news. There's no good or bad” - Master Oogway
● Think about the worst that can happen, but know that it’s not real. “I consider
failure on a regular basis.” - Bill Gates
● Practice fear setting

19. Agenda
● Why time management?
● Time management is not about time
● Feeling overwhelmed - 3 rules of mental management
● Feeling demotivated - 3 rules of motivation
● Putting it all together - planning hierarchy
● Putting it all together - flow state
● Conclusions

20. Feeling demotivated -
Causes of this feelings:
● When we do something we think is meaningless
● When we don’t have clarity about what we are doing
● When we believe the work can’t be done
● When we think the work takes a long time to complete

21. The 3 rules of motivation
● Rule of meaning: We are only motivated to do something when we can derive
meaning from it.
● Rule of achievability: We can only be motivated to do something if we believe the
goal is achievable.
● Rule of feedback/reward: The shorter the feedback loop, the more motivated we
are to do the task.

22. Rule of meaning
He Who Has A Why Can Bear Any How -- Carl Jung
We are only motivated to do something when we can derive meaning from it.
● Asking what is the purpose of this task
● Meaning creates rewards when the task is done - see rule of reward

23. Rule of meaning

24. Rule of achievability
We can only be motivated to do something if we believe the goal is achievable. In other
words, if we believe everything is achievable, we can be motivated to do anything.
Better to underestimate a task than to overestimate it.
Better to be overconfident than to be underconfident.
Bias for action.

25. Rule of feedback/reward
● Why are we motivated to do something?
○ Because we are expecting a reward from it
● Basic/essential rewards serve 2 purposes: survival and reproduction
○ food/water/sex/safety/respect/belonging etc.
● Other rewards are created by association
○ Money: Associate with basic rewards such as safety, respect, etc.
○ Title/social status: Associate with respect and safety

26. Rule of feedback/reward
The shorter the feedback loop, the more motivated we are to do the task. (This is
related to Pavlov conditioning and association of reward).
We feel good when we finish some work, doesn’t matter how big it is.
● Make unit test runs faster to speed up the feedback loop
● Break task down to smaller, more manageable tasks (quick feedback of reward)
● Structure the work so that we keep progressing, achieving something, although
small. Example: Apply TDD while coding.
● Careful as this can turn us into workaholics.

27. Agenda
● Why time management?
● Time management is not about time
● Feeling overwhelmed - rules of mental management
● Feeling demotivated - rules of motivation
● Putting it all together - planning hierarchy
● Putting it all together - flow state
● Conclusions

28. Putting it all together: Planning hierarchy
Plans Are Worthless, But Planning Is Everything
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

29. Putting it all together: Planning hierarchy

30. Putting it all together: Planning hierarchy
● Specifying a mission (a problem to solve) that has personal meaning to us (rule of
meaning)
● Derive a vision (idealized solution) that is clear and achievable (rule of clarity and
achievable)

31. Putting it all together: Planning hierarchy (cont.)
● Create a strategy (set of guiding principles) to achieve that vision, using the rules
of mental management above
○ Prioritization: example: focusing on serving this niche set of customers
● Write a roadmap: convert strategy to concrete steps
● Execute: Day to day activities
Notes:
● Write everything down to improve effectiveness

32. Problems with planning hierarchy
● Observation and monitoring is not included
● Constant experimentation and learning is not included
● Modified hierarchy: Turn it into a loop.

33. Tesla’s planning hierarchy
Mission: “Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable
transport.” (This was recently updated when Tesla merged with SolarCity.)
Vision: To summarize, Tesla’s vision is to reduce vehicle carbon emissions through the
advent of electric vehicles.
Strategy: This is the famous “Master Plan:” 1) build sports car, 2) use that money to
build an affordable car, 3) use that money to build an even more affordable car, 4)
while doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options, and
then finally 5) don’t tell anyone.

34. Holistics’ planning hierarchy
● Mission: Make it possible for all companies to get insights from data
● Vision: An end-to-end data platform that bring the whole data team together
● Strategy (product)
○ Applying principles of software engineering and DevOps to data analytics
○ Focusing on features that remove the bottleneck between data analysts and business users
● Roadmap: Ask Thong
● Execution: Ask everyone

35. Day to day planning hierarchy
● Mission: Finish multi-model dataset feature
● Vision: Both the UI and the backend is done with proper testing
● Strategy
○ Design the proper API between front-end and back-end, then go from there
● Roadmap:
○ Finish backend first, then frontend
● Execution:
○ Work on backend
○ Work on frontend

36. Agenda
● Why time management?
● Time management is not about time
● Feeling overwhelmed - rules of mental management
● Feeling demotivated - rules of motivation
● Putting it all together - planning hierarchy
● Putting it all together - flow state
● Conclusions

37. Putting it all together: Execution - Flow state
Flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state of
operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of
energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

38. Flow state

39. Flow state - from game design principles
To achieve flow state:
1. Concrete and meaningful goals (Rule of meaning, rule of limitation and rule of
achievability)
2. Goals should have right amount pressure: deadline, external demand, etc. (Rule of
stress)
3. Goals should fit players' capabilities (Rule of stress and rule of achievability)
4. Clear and timely feedback (Rule of feedback/reward)
5. No extraneous information that inhibits concentration (Rule of limitation)

40. Lesson learned: plan our work like a game designer
● Find meanings in our work
○ This can bring values to a lot of people
○ I'm going to learn a lot of things from my work
● Plan beforehand so we trust that this work is the best work to do right now
● Set up right amount of pressure
● Break task down to smaller, more manageable tasks
● Clear out all distractions, only keep relevant sources of information nearby
● Set right expectation: Don’t feel bad when a task is interrupted and we need to
switch to more important task.

41. Bonus: Getting things done framework

42. Missing contents
● Health and energy
○ Exercise
○ Nutrition
○ Sleep
● Habits
● Meditation

43. Conclusions
It is possible to be both productive while having fun doing it. The secret lies on:
● Understand the rules of mental management and motivation
● Separating planning and execution.
● Planning: having clear mission, vision and strategy
● Execution: Structure the work like a game designer to induce flow state

44. Homework
● Read through the rules and see how to apply them to improve both productivity
and happiness
● Adopt a note taking software or buy a notebook and start to dump info in there
● Start to create personal plan using planning hierarchy
● Start to plan day to day work to achieve flow state