Time Management at Khan Academy (opens in new tab)

I think for me the fundamental problem is I don't have a big stake in my work as a regular employee. You just can't make yourself run at full throttle for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, plus (unpaid) overtime.

Work is getting stupid now. All the gains go to someone else for most people.

Everyone says they "tried X for a few weeks but let it lapse". Is this because ultimately we cannot work full throttle without big incentives?

Yes we all have fear as a driver but I find this wears off quick.

> The only trick that really stuck to me is to write down on a piece of paper where I'm at during a context switch.

Oh, maybe I do that too? I'm not sure if I blame this on my memory, but sometimes to do X I need to do Y and then Z (specially when starting a project), and then I forget why I was doing Z in the first place. I'm using Trello for doing things at work, and after a "Doing" column, I put a "Doing now" that usually has only one task to simulate the writing in a piece of paper. Sometimes it turns out into a "stack" of tasks with the switchs. It's usually really short term tasks. Not sure if you are talking about something like that.

Before that I used to write in my notebook what my task was, so I don't lose focus.

Would you be interested in trying our beta [1] once it's ready? We're working on the hypothesis that bad meeting schedules can result in a large drop in productivity, especially for software related jobs.

Our current solution is to make it easier to cordon off blocks of time and easily reschedule disruptive meetings using a mix of auto-suggested times and meeting polls.

[1] http://www.timeferret.com

whats type A?

I used to be an avid GTD follower (David Allen's "Getting Things Done"). The book was an epiphany for me, but the whole system can be overwhelming. I now just use three text files (for work-related planning) for a Kanban-like system:

  * work due today
  * work due this week
  * work due this month or later

Every Monday, I pull work from the monthly list to this week's list. Then every day I pull work from this week's list to today's list. This allows me to focus on today, confident that I am not missing something. I can then ignore anything that doesn't need to be done until later. This is the theory, at least. ;-)

For me, I simply cannot do something like spend an hour on Monday morning to plan what I need to get done that week, because I simply do not know. I could plan what I think I need to get done, but I know that before noon it will all change so why bother?

I do know what my priorities are, and I work on them as time allows, but I cannot plan when things will get done.

Would you want your builder to make you a house just "going by feel"? Or a surgeon to operate on you with the idea that "he's just going to poke around and play it by ear"?

When the stakes are high people think ahead, organize, and make plans. If you consider your career progression to be low stakes by all means don't plan.

I've worked extensively with both of the first two and they are excellent teammates; I'd be happy to work with either of them again. They are both very productive, and your hypothesis that they are both managers is incorrect.

Sort of agree but I would've liked to see how John Resig manages his time.

That said, Khan Academy has some interesting tech:

http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/aphrodite-inline-cs...

I find these sorts of posts more useful than blog posts about web scale technology. They're more relevant to a much wider group of people. For example, while it's interesting that Netflix are migrating their billing system to AWS, and the way they solve their problems is fascinating, the actual technology stuff is only useful if you're likely to face a similar problem, and the chances are you aren't. In fact, if you're reading their blog posts to learn things, you're probably going to massively over-engineer your next web app.