Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of something I have been mulling on.

let’s call it “the death of project management”.

- Every Human and by extension every group of humans has an id ego and superego

As we expand up sizes of groups (I take two orders of magnitude) we treat the lower group as id and their day to day needs become angry passions to us.

The point being making a plan seems like ego managing the balance. But far too often the plan is prescriptive guesswork and holding to the plan is inflexible and frequently poor choice.

The point I am trying to make is plans that involve dates are almost always the wrong kind of plan but we still need to track where we have spent time and need to make the journey many times (something about patchworks vs zippers)

View on HN

The problem with plans is that they are "linear" thinking tools.

Life is chaotic. Picture, for analogy, a Lorenz attractor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmbq82jwHgY our projects gravitate toward a goal, we make adjustments that drive us closer and push us apart. We can't go back and make difference choices, so where we are and where we go heavily depends on where we were.

When we define plans or delegate, I think too often we think in terms of "I am here and I want to get there" instead of "what is a robust way to nudge us toward our defined goals, how should the forces that shape our trajectories balance out to keep us in the right regions of the space of possibilities."

In a sense, this is the difference between having a project and having a strategy.

Interesting idea! Along similar lines, this year, I am planning in terms of number of hours available in the year and how I want to allocate those hours, without binding them to specific dates. We'll see how it goes and whether or not it helps me accomplish what I want to accomplish.

This, to me, is identical to the concept of "reverse budgeting" (aka "pay yourself first" or "every dollar has a job" in YNAB terms) in the financial domain, but instead applied to the time problem space.

If you assign every hour a job, and you take care of "paying yourself first" by taking into account critical/high-priority time-spend first and then allocating for yourself the liesure time last; assuming that your estimates are correct and realistic and don't forget to include all overhead, you can safely say "hey, I have budgeted away 4 hours of free time today and I can use it guilt-free because I already have accounted for all my critical tasks time-spend."

The reason this is not often done however is because it's hard. Time continuously moves, you can never pause to analyze your usage. And the assumption that "your estimates are correct include all overhead" is really hard to ensure - you need to have excellent time tracking and estimation skills to inform/predict those estimates. And time tracking is too much effort to do manually, so it requires good supporting systems, which require intensive classification techniques, which really don't exist yet.

But I digress. We're basically discussing budgeting, but for hours instead of currency, here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com