In the world of time management, we deserve better

Recently, 50 people were generous enough to share their experiences of time management with me. Their stories echoed my own.

Hundreds of tools promise to help us with productivity and time management. Few of them help us do the most meaningful things, though. They don't make it easier to prioritize, focus, or feel like what we have done is enough, ever.

The tools we have today are designed to help us do more things, faster. Track everything! Maximize everything! Accomplish in a day what you used to do in a week! AI can turn your 10-hour project into a 30-minute one so you can do more things while somehow also feeling calmer! The standards will just get higher with the saved time! Yay!

?? how well is this working for all of us?

I've built a system that helps me human-size my workload, and I'm considering building the kind of tool that can help others too. I need your voices to build something that genuinely helps more of us. Thus, the feedback.

If you resonate with anything I just shared, I want to share the themes I gathered from the feedback so far, what's coming next, and why I believe this is worth doing.

Themes from your feedback

1. Everyone's trying really hard to get this right -?out of everyone I talked to, every single person said they have actively tried MULTIPLE time management solutions. Some of you feel really great about where they are now, some don't, but you have all invested real effort in finding something that works for you.?

2. Prioritization is difficult -?for most people, the biggest gap isn't necessarily tracking everything (we have a million tools to do that), but prioritizing it all. You talked about not knowing what to do with surprise extra time, regularly wondering if you were missing something, and spending a lot of time culling through your list or moving incomplete items from one day to the next.

3. Mixed feelings and a lack of confidence make wins tricky -?even those of you with great systems see the gaps, or you'll have great days and bad days. Feeling the need to 'catch up' after a 'bad day' can be overwhelming. We're all doing our best, but it seems like it's hard to feel consistently good about that.?

4. Reactiveness sucks, and proactiveness is taxing?-?many of us feel more reactive to demands on our time than proactive about what we want to do...but it also takes a good bit of discipline and drive to remain proactive in a world that's constantly clamoring for attention.?

5. Accountability matters -?We need something (or someone) to interact with us, to help us evaluate what's going on, and to hold us accountable to what we want to do.? The biggest theme words in terms of how we all want to experience our days are peace, focus, clarity, rhythm, simplicity, and open space.

What's Coming Next

The two biggest areas of overlap between my time budgeting idea and the feedback were?accountability and prioritization. I've been calling it TILE (for Time-Intention-Life-Energy) because I need to call it something and because the work units I?budget can be moved around like tiles. We'll see if it sticks.

The idea for TILE came from my own time budgeting methodology, which I?started using when the other systems left me with impossible lists of tasks I just kept kicking down the road. It helps me plan my time each week with a direct eye on how much time I have available (without cluttering up my calendar).?

After talking with a skilled software developer who was kind enough to share his wisdom with me, I?learned that the easiest solution will likely be some kind of wrap-around tool to layer on top of an existing AI tool.

TILE could use AI to:

- Prioritize open projects

- Human-size your to-do list (constraining it by the actual time and energy you have available)

-?Automatically adjust the budget for scheduled meetings

- Reorganize after glitches in the matrix (like a sick kid or emergency)

- Interact with each user to share thoughts/data/encouragement (like?helping us see what % of our time is committed to revenue generating activities or a major project)

Recently, I?realized that I?had made some active choices that were harmful to me - I'd started waking up early to work and working during my daughters' down time, eating up the only two hours in each day I?had to myself for my own care or other projects as the primary project manager/chef/cleaner/parent in our home. I'd allowed myself to budget work in those windows. After a serious health scare that served as a wake up call, I stopped allowing that...and my budget helped me to make that shift very tangibly. Time budgeting can't save me from myself entirely, but it definitely helps.?

I've directly installed my system with two other people, too, as a deeper test. One of them is using it exactly like I do, and the other is making major adaptations but finding it really helpful. I use Notion as a workaround tool, and it's fine, but there are limitations I'd love to get around.

I believe the right next step now is to create a low-fidelity but functional prototype (I?want to keep things very simple at this stage) and walk people through it on a personal level to see if we can prove out the model with real application. I know almost zero about AI, so it'll be a fun side project.? If you'd like to be a guinea pig for trying this out when it's ready, just comment 'me' and I'll keep you in the loop!

Why This Is Worth Doing

A friend recently shared?this fascinating talk with me. In it, Ian Beacraft, the founder of Signal and Cipher, talked about how AI might reshape how we work together. It's worth the listen. One point stuck with me -?he believes that AI will enable 'creative generalists' and more time for deep work for all of us.

At the dawn of computers,?economists predicted?a mass leisure class because of all that time we were saving. Instead, we're working harder than ever.?Home technology like washers and vacuums eliminated hours of work...but we bumped our expectations up accordingly.?I fully expect that AI will do nothing to give us more deep work time - not unless we build the tools that don't just help us track and produce, but that actually help us focus, do less, and decide when we have done?enough.?

I don't want to build something to help us do more, or to do the same amount faster. I want to build something to help us shut out the noise.?

I?have no idea what will come of all of this, but I?believe there's something here.

Thanks for being on the journey with me - and if you have any feedback/ideas/thoughts to share with me, I?would love to hear them!