Sabbatical Time Management
Two months into my technical sabbatical, I now realize I was naive to think that I'd work through the learning materials sequentially, eating one book at a time like a printing press. The reality is I'm frequently jumping between numerous books, online tutorials, coding projects, and other resources to maintain momentum, but incurring a significant context switching cost by doing so.
Instead of focusing on being a finisher, I've procrastinated by implementing an elaborate Learning Management System.
Setback Anxieties
In last month's update, I shared my struggles around being rusty at coding and algorithmic thinking. Once I hit the recursion challenges on Exercism.org, progress stalled, and I felt like I was wasting time and falling behind.
Then I had the insight to track time spent on learning instead of how many challenges I'd done. Seems obvious in hindsight, no?
Focus To-Do
Focus To-Do is a pomodoro-based project & time management solution that fits my needs perfectly. Costing a grand total of $12 (forever, no subscription fees!), it comes with a slew of useful features such as:
- Fully configurable pomodoro timers, which build a satisfying chain of clock icons on a task.
- A regular timer for counting up when you don't want to do set blocks.
- A tagging system, which I use to track learning verbs (coding, writing, reading, watching, etc.) so I can balance my chakras.
- White noise/ambiance sounds when you want to focus to the sound of rain, a cafe, brown noise, etc.
- Cloud sync so I can use it from my phone, tablet, and Mac.
- And more.
To be clear, I'm not sponsored by them or an affiliate, I just really like how well this product meets my needs.
My Setup
At the highest level, I use folders to group big initiatives. Each resource (book, course, platform, coding project, etc.) is a project within a folder.
Before working on something, I create a task within each project and add a verb tag. Then I start the timer and get to work.
This structure creates all the pretty graphs below with enough fidelity for me to both manage numerous resources, as well as address issues, like the fact that I'm not spending enough time coding vs. reading, and clearly very distracted by a fantastic AI Engineering book.
From here on out, you can expect my monthly/quarterly sabbatical summaries to include metrics from this app.