Memento

A personal approach to controlling rogue time.

Qoute

“Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The cops don’t catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts, they make notes and they draw conclusions. Facts, not memory.”

Leonard Shelby

Definitions

• Time can divide into three era: past, present and future.
• But era is more rebel that we can imagine. So we should trap it in more short-period boundaries. I call those boundaries: TimeBoxes
• From this point you just see timeboxes. There are no opaque words like past, present and future.
• Every timebox has only one StartPoint and only one EndPoint.
• In any timebox, you define at least one Goal.
• Goals can consist of: Routines or Jobs or both of them.
  • A Job consist of at least one Task.
• Jobs, tasks, routines also have a time boundary.(startpoint and endpoint.)
• Every timebox has at least one Outcome.
• Every job/routine has only one outcome.
• Outcome is a number between 0% - 100%.
• Routines/jobs/tasks should have Priorities.
• The steps that you follow to do a specific routine or job are called: Recipe.
  • Recipes can be shared by people.
• In every moment, you should be in a timebox.
• TimeBoxes don't overlap with each other.
• Timebox duration is up to you. It can be one hour, one day, one week, two weeks, one month, one year, etc..
• You can Chain timeboxes as long as you have goals for every timebox.
• Past are just collection of timeboxes that their lifetime were finished. (Look at it as a treasure or a way to be more productive in the Present/Future era.)
• Experiences are the outcome of timeboxes that their endpoints are less than current time.
• Plans are timeboxes that their startpoint are greater than current time.
  • If you can’t define at least one timebox, don't plan!
• But time is not always manageable.
• You can get sick. There may be an earthquake in your city. Or any other accidents that are beyond your control. How deal with them?
• We call these unpredictable accidents: Events.
• So you should have Buffers in your timeboxes to deal with events.
• You should define goals for your buffers. If no event occurred, follow them.
• Assign a portion of every timebox for buffers.(something between 5% and 20% is reasonable)

How use this approach?

The simplest way is to write your own recipes/timeboxes on a paper and start following them :) To help you get the idea, i included a simple recipe in this repo.

But the better way is to transform this approach to a software. So if you're a programmer, you're free to implement this specification in any kind of software form that you like. (A library, an android app, a desktop app, etc..)

Keywords

• TimeBox
• Goal
• Routine
• Job
• Task
• Outcome
• Priorities
• Recipe
• Experiences
• Plans

Contribution

• If you have any idea to improve this approach, please let me know :)
• Also you can share your recipes with other people. Just create a PR for each recipe.

Diagram