Effective Time Management

NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft touched down on Mars' surface in the summer of 1997, and it immediately started sending breathtaking, enduring images back to Earth. But after a few days, a terrible mistake was made. Transmissions came to an end. In reality, Pathfinder was procrastinating by keeping itself busy but neglecting to complete its most crucial tasks. What was happening? It turned out that its scheduler had a bug. Every operating system has a component known as the scheduler that instructs the CPU on when and what to switch to after finishing each task.

When used properly, computers seamlessly switch between their various tasks, creating the impression that everything is being done at once. But when something goes wrong, we all know what happens. At the very least, this ought to bring us some comfort. Even computers occasionally experience overload. Learning about the computer science behind scheduling may help us understand how we as humans deal with time. One of the first realizations is that all the time you spend prioritizing your work is time that you are not using to complete it. Let's say you scan all the messages in your inbox when you check it, selecting the ones that are the most crucial.

After dealing with that one, you proceed to the next. It makes sense, but there's a problem with this. This is a quadratic-time algorithm, as the name suggests. These passes will take twice as long and require twice as many attempts if your inbox is twice as full! Four times as much work is required. In 2003, the Linux operating system's programmers ran into a similar issue. Every single task performed by Linux was ranked according to importance, and it occasionally spent more time ranking tasks than actually performing them. The programmers' counterintuitive solution was to substitute a small number of priority "buckets" for this complete ranking.

The system took longer to move forward but more than made up for it by being less precise about what to do next. So, insisting on always doing the most crucial task first with your emails could result in a breakdown. It might take nine times longer to clear an inbox that is three times as full as usual when you wake up. You'd do better to respond randomly or in reverse chronological order! Unexpectedly, sometimes giving up on completing tasks in a specific order may be the key to finishing them.

Computer scheduling also provides insight into interruptions, which are one of the most common aspects of contemporary life. A computer must perform a "context switch" when switching from one task to another, which involves bookmarking its position within the previous task and moving old data out of its memory to make room for new data. These actions all have a price. The key takeaway from this is that productivity and responsiveness fundamentally trade off. To get serious work done, context switches must be kept to a minimum.

However, being responsive entails responding whenever a situation arises. These two ideas are fundamentally at odds with one another. We can choose where to strike that balance by realizing this tension. Minimizing interruptions is the obvious solution. Grouping them is the less obvious option. You should check notifications and emails no less frequently than once every hour, for example, if none of them require a response right away. I'm done. This concept is known as interrupt coalescing in the field of computer science.

Instead of responding to issues as they arise Oh, the mouse moved, I see. There was a key press? Was that file downloaded once more? Based on how long they can wait before being interrupted, the system groups these interruptions together. In 2013, interruption coalescing led to a significant increase in laptop battery life. This is so that a system can check everything at once and then swiftly return to a low-power state by deferring interruptions. We are similar to computers in this regard. We users might be able to reclaim our own attention and one of the things that feels so scarce in contemporary life—relaxation—by using a similar strategy.