Time management tool
I discovered/invented/reinvented a time management tool (it's quite likely it already exists, but it was new to me).
Last week I felt I had too many tasks to keep track of, so I made a simple Excel sheet showing the tasks and their start dates and deadlines:
But I felt that looked misleading: it looked like the Grand Vision task (in green) was really small, when in fact it was huge, just with a short deadline; and it looked like the work for Mateusz (blue) was bigger than it was, when in fact it was pretty tiny. So I instinctively resized the row heights to make the bigger tasks bigger, with the area of each box corresponding to (my guess at) the size of the task, a bit like a histogram:
Then I realised that a neat thing that falls out of this diagram is that I can look at the column for a single day and get an immediate visual impression of roughly how I should be allocating my time on that day. For example, on the 6th, I should spend about half my time on Grand Vision, and most of the rest divided equally between the CIE mapping and FPGA tasks:
Last week I felt I had too many tasks to keep track of, so I made a simple Excel sheet showing the tasks and their start dates and deadlines:
But I felt that looked misleading: it looked like the Grand Vision task (in green) was really small, when in fact it was huge, just with a short deadline; and it looked like the work for Mateusz (blue) was bigger than it was, when in fact it was pretty tiny. So I instinctively resized the row heights to make the bigger tasks bigger, with the area of each box corresponding to (my guess at) the size of the task, a bit like a histogram:
Then I realised that a neat thing that falls out of this diagram is that I can look at the column for a single day and get an immediate visual impression of roughly how I should be allocating my time on that day. For example, on the 6th, I should spend about half my time on Grand Vision, and most of the rest divided equally between the CIE mapping and FPGA tasks: