The rule of 3 in time management & productivity.

http://blog.belimitless.co/post/73416815446/the-rule-of-3

by balajiviswanath • 12 years ago

43 23 12 years ago

blog.belimitless.co

westiseast2• 12 years ago

I though it was (1) Don't have kids, (2) Don't have kids and (3) Don't have kids. No? :)

shuaib2• 12 years ago

Productivity that will eventually result in the extinction of mankind? :)

pstack• 12 years ago

Not likely. The irresponsible will always reproduce like rabbits by the drinking age.

gumby2• 12 years ago

Fuck it, let other people worry about the extinction of humanity -- they can have the kids. The genetic differences between all of us are pretty minor anyway, so one's as good as another.

Who knows who Aristotle's kids were anyway?

hobo_mark3• 12 years ago

You say this in jest, but I also don't understand how people chose to have a full-time job (even worse, a startup) AND kids (not judging anyone, I just do not understand it). There clearly aren't enough hours in a day to manage both as well as they deserve and not live a stressful life. Before you reach for that downvote button, this is what I am personally doing:

- try to become financially independent (with the sweat and all-nighters that go along with it, when needed)

- if (and only IF) I ever manage to do so, start a family with the good conscience that I will have the means to be there as a father

- if not, rinse and repeat until I do

Does it make any sense?

slurry4• 12 years ago

No, it doesn't make sense. Your comment is naive and/or jerkish. You should feel bad about yourself for posting it.

nate_meurer• 12 years ago

Here's how I fucked up: I dicked around throughout college and years after (and high school, really), paying little attention to career, finance, direction, and organization in general. I got more serious just as my two daughters were born, which means that the years of their young childhoods have seen me distracted by goals and demands that I should have addressed years ago.

If you like your children (not everyone does), their youngest years can be absolutely fucking magical. Nothing else in my life compares, and here's the real bummer: it's short. I love the people my kids become as they grow through the stages of their young lives, but they turn into different people, and jesus christ I miss my babies.

So yes, absolutely, get your shit together while you're a young woman or a young man. Make it your goal to be able to relax in the presence of your children. You only get one shot.

wonderzombie• 12 years ago

I don't think you're intending to flaunt the fact that these are realistic goals for you but not for others. But it is very easy to read this as such. Some of that turns on what you mean by "financial independence" — if you mean something other than a full-time or multiple part-time jobs, it entails a whole other set of preferences and priorities which are relatively narrow.

A key piece here is that there is a hard deadline, at least for women, and if you have a partner & intend to someday have kids, that needs to be on your radar. A bunch of probabilities re: outcomes of pregnancy start to change as a woman OR man gets older.

There's also relative age of parents to children. Like it or not, your energy level and resilience will change as you progress past your 20s and into your 30s. You could make a decent case that young people are in some dimensions well-suited to raising kids.

And don't forget about your own age relative to your child as an adult— there's a relatively large delta between 60 years old and 70 in terms of mobility, health, etc.

Human beings are also incredibly resilient. It's not something to be proud of, that people who're struggling can somehow make things work, but the reality is that what may seem completely infeasible to you can still work. There's a vast range of outcomes which could arguably constitute "success" or "failure," to the extent those terms have any meaning.

Finally, remember the adage that happiness equals reality divided by expectations. Just as expectations can be too low, they can be too high. You can try to control for every possible outcome, setting up an optimal parenting situation, but it's all a gamble. Shit happens, incl. kids themselves. And while it may look to you like other people made suboptimal choices, maybe try to remember the foregoing.

westiseast2• 12 years ago

the part which resonates with me is your first one - financial independence. Starting a business isn't for everyone, and it can be hugely risky, but before money came 2nd or 3rd behind career development and maybe challenges. Now stability of income is probably no.1, and it's changed the way I run my business.

pdevr• 12 years ago

This ensures that you finish at least the top three tasks everyday. A good start.

There is a subset of people who have more than three tasks with equal priority to be done on a daily basis. They will still be overwhelmed, since the carried over tasks over a period of time will be too much to handle for the "role of 3" way.

patrickmay• 12 years ago

This is a variant of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. Instead of three items, he recommends always knowing what the most important task is for any project, and doing that.

Definitely worth a look.

tomhallett• 12 years ago

The biggest part of GTD which has really helped keep me organized and achieving my goals, is recognizing your memory can be fairly terrible at remembering things when it is important to remember them. So everything I need todo gets written down. Then I will stop stressing about my todo list and forcing myself to remember. He calls it "mind like water".

With this technique + kanban for my personal life (todos, open source projects, baby books, etc) my wife is 1000% happier.

The rule of 3 in time management & productivity.

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