I did something different today. I added a few time-oriented tags to my task management set up: #5min, #10min, #15min, and #30min.

That’s nothing new in task-management world, but it is for me. I’ve previously avoided using a time-estimate tag because I’m notoriously bad at estimating how long something will take.

I think organizing some notes will take ten minutes and an hour later, I’m still at it.

So, why am I re-thinking this?

Because I realized that if I allocate ten minutes for something and after ten minutes I’m not even close to finished, it doesn’t matter. At least I’ve worked on the thing for ten minutes.

So, instead of thinking about these tags as “estimates” I’m going to think about them as “allocations”. “How long I’ll work on this task” instead of “how long I think this task will take”.

In a way, this is a form of time-blocking, using very small blocks of time. Five minutes to check email, ten minutes for brainstorming ideas, 15 minutes for research.

Maybe after I do this for a while, I’ll get better at estimating. I hope so. Because when I’m sitting in a doctor’s office and I have five minutes, I’d like to be able to call up my list of 5-minute tasks and actually get one of them done.

Allocate some time to get more referrals