Theming Experiment Part 2
Rob Coles
Time theming is a flexible approach to task management that I discovered through articles and books by Mike Vardy . I gave an introduction to time theming, and how I was planning to implement this in the previous post, Theming Experiment Part 1 and I didn’t make any changes to the process during this Tiny Experiment.
This post looks at the findings after running theming as a Tiny Experiment for 2 months. TL:DR I am keeping it.
I was not expecting a 10x productivity gain from theming, and the improvements I have seen are subtler, but very real. I am recently retired, so I have a lot of control over my day and task choices. Your mileage may vary, but these are the concrete benefits for me:
Structure to the week
Structure was one of the things that I missed when I stopped working, and I flailed around a bit. Now I know that Monday is music day, Tuesday is learning and improving and so on, that’s given a bit more of a cadence and structure to the week and I am much happier with that.
Task selection
The daily theme helped mitigate earlier overwhelm with picking tasks. As discussed in the previous post, I’ve modified my system to automatically pull theme priority 1 tasks and suggest theme priority 2 tasks ahead of the other to-dos in my daily note to-do list, so the theme tasks are very “in my face” and a much smaller subset of the list I used to be faced with daily.
Deferring tasks
Theming has also helped in not feeling guilty or concerned about deferring most new tasks, rather than jumping on them immediately. I know that there’s a day that’s allocated to doing that kind of work, and batching the tasks cuts down on context-switching.
Frog Friday tasks
There does still need to be some discipline on my part, obviously. Frog Friday worked well for me with selling a timeshare - a task I managed to put off for over a year as I kept hitting a wall and shelving the task . Frog Friday has been a plus generally, but an aversive task is still an aversive task. Even if I have a dedicated day for aversive tasks, I can still find less aversive tasks to push the worst one off. I don’t think there’s a system anywhere that’s going to help with that! I need to try another technique to get started with those, and maybe dig a bit deeper into why those tasks are so aversive. I’ll try the “just do 5 minutes” approach on the last of my old “frog” list tasks on Friday.
Flexibility
I followed Mike Vardy’s advice and left two days un-themed. I’m kind of using those as catch-up days. I do quite a lot of babysitting for my grandson, sometimes on quite short notice. His dad is prone to migraines and if that happens I might get the call, and then half of the day I had planned is unavailable. Leaving Wednesday and Saturday unthemed gives me those days available as potential catch-up days. Once I’ve picked a task I try to do it rather than deferring it to the next day for that theme.
Horizontal theming
I kept the horizontal theming simple. It’s just meditation at lunchtime currently, and I haven’t missed a streak in the two months since I’ve been running theming. It’s a solid habit now. I will try changing the lunchtime horizontal theme to include “non-fiction reading”, now the meditation is a given.
Drawbacks and issues
I haven’t really had any issues or found any drawbacks so far. If an urgent tasks turns up on a themed day that doesn’t fit the theme, that’s fine, I’ll treat it as I would a calendar appointment for the day and fit anything else around it. The theming is really there to help pick the day’s tasks, it is not a rigid “everything today has to relate to the theme” mandate.
I was initially concerned that tasks may fall through the cracks since not every task is themed, but these are surfaced on the non-themed days and it has not proved to be an issue.
Next steps
I will be continuing to use daily and horizontal theming as my main task management methodology, and am looking at extending theming to include weekly and quarterly themes.
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