Time Slicers

I was reading back some of my oldest blog posts and found a few of my experiments with time + task management like Timetable Draft 3, throught out the last 15 years I continued this trend of working out new time solutions whenever I find I have free time.

My brother recently graduated and the second day after he was “free” for the first time in his life, and true to form he worked out a time plan that was going to be amazing, I laughed when I saw it because I knew how that’s gonna go. The time plan he sent me was extreme in that it attempts to plan every hour of every day of the week! I don’t think I ever got that far but I did get close:

For the last few months I’ve been using this system on and off that I call time slicing, thought I share it for weird ones like us lol

Time Slicing

Time slicing works for me because it accepts the unexpected things in life and the overlap between social life, dating, and work. The basic principle is that a single time slice is ideally about 3 hours and a half (or less depending on circumstances). Every day you realistically have up to 4 slices you can assign, the last slice is usually a half slice.

The first step is to identify the pillars of your life, whatever they may be. In my case I have 5 pillars:

1. Work/Financial
2. Gamedev/Motorcycling
3. Family/Friends
4. Social/Dating
5. Health/Workout

Every day, a particular pillar is considered priority, every week I have 4-5 days where Work and Gamedev are considered priority, and remaining 3-2 days prioritize Family/Friends and Social life.

For any given slice, the aim is not to reach 100% time utilization. A slice is considered satisfied if I reach 60% utilization which is a little over 2 hours per 3h30m slice.

Health/Workout use a special slice that gets a shortened duration between 1-2 hours but semi-daily. It covers both mental and physical health,.

For Work/Financial and Gamedev, the priority is not utilization but building positive momentum. When starting a new endeavor/project the first two weeks are expected to be weak due to low momentum.

There is one indespinsible tool needed for this system to work. A simple hours/minutes timer with a loud annoying alarm (kitchen timer works). I used the timer in my phone at the beginning but when I switched to a physical timer that lives on my work desk (similar to these ones), the whole system became much more stable.

Writing the description of this system down made me realize it appears to be complex. But practically speaking? it completely gets out of the way and leaves me to focus on my current task, it requires almost no active maintainence besides setting the timer between slices. The planning and prioritization of slices is done as part of Health/Workout sessions either during actual workouts (outdoors especially) or when writing journals/recording audio logs once or twice a week.