How to Manage Your Time ⏱️

Tactics and tools to tame the mess, plan reliably and be productive.

Over the years I have spoken with hundreds of engineers, managers and founders.

The most productive ones I know all have one trait in common: they are very intentional about how they manage their time. They organize tasks in a certain way, have rules for their calendar, meetings, and focus time.

These are no small tweaks. Many recall having a real breakthrough after they changed specific aspects of their daily schedule, and could never go back.

I am one of those people.

Over time I have experimented with various ways of organizing my work. By doing so I have learned more about myself, and I feel now the most productive I have ever been.

In the past couple of weeks I have reached out to tens of incredible people, plus friends on the Refactoring Community, to collect patterns and strategies.

I matched them with my own experience and wrote the very best advice on personal productivity that I am capable of.

We will talk about:

• 🕰️ Time is an illusion — why using time is not the best way to plan your work.

• 🍅 Pomodoros — a simple technique that changed everything for me.

• ⏱️ Timeboxing — how to leverage your calendar for productivity.

• 👥 Meetings — how to arrange meetings for your sanity.

• 🔄 Feedback Loop — how to keep going and get better over time.

• 🔨 Tools — how to implement all of this with tools.

Let’s dive in 👇

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🕰️ Time is an illusion

The most natural way to estimate the effort of your tasks is by using time. You take a task and say “it will take one hour”.

If you apply this to everything you have to do, you should get a reasonable expectation of how much you can achieve over a single day — or a week.

But does this really work? Like, in real life?

I did just that for many years, with mixed results. I had good days where I did more than expected, and bad days where I did less. The higher the timeframe, of course, the more inaccurate the results would be. Small misses over a single day would become abysmal divergences over a full week.

This wasn’t a matter of productivity—I was happy with how much I was doing anyway—but rather of being able to predict my output and plan work properly.

The problem lies in the fact that your available time is just loosely correlated to how much work you can do. For two reasons:

• ⚡ Available time ≠ available energy — there is a limited amount of energy you can spend over a single day.

• ⚖️ Not all tasks are created equal — some are more cognitively intense; others are lighter. Two hours of intense design work can easily knock you out for the whole day. Two hours of processing emails is a different story.

As software engineers, we invented story points to decouple effort from time. Story points are totally made up, but they work. We count how many points we complete over a week, and get an estimate of our velocity.

What is the equivalent of story points for our lives?