Study Tip: Time Management
I’m returning to my theme that personal time management, which is by definition also energy management, is likewise a guided meditation into more generalized concepts in computer science, which is why so-called “busy housewives” are well-positioned to maintain their positions of mastery.
Likewise farmers. Likewise cooks, chefs. Bartenders.
These disparate skill sets have something in common: a mature, well-developed approach towards multi-tasking.
As a Visual FoxPro coder, I was tunneling down, from the events-driven GUI, while Python was burrowing upward, from close to the metal, from C (C the computer language, glorified assembler as some see it). I took for granted we had an events loop running in the background, ready to pick up where it left off, on any number of only partially completed tasks.
Finish the dishes, start the oven, load the dryer, pop buns in the oven, return to folding clothes, all the while listening to podcasts through a pair of earbuds.
If you’ve looked into coding, you know it’s all about switching stuff around, like in a railyard, following one track after another, but in an order the running program itself has control over.
I was boiling a couple cobs of corn on the stove just now as I wrote the above, when my phone rang and I got invited to lunch. The corn is fresh and just now finished, so I’ll treat them as a snack and then drive over to the lunch location.
Various tasks I’ve started around the house, can wait.
I’m listening to Jazz Radio, out of Lyon, France, on my iPad, thanks to Radio Garden, an app.
When you’re up to something you might consider mundane, like housework, or riding the bus, take the opportunity to ascend to a meta level and consider the bigger picture from another angle.
A lot of you already do this routinely. Consider this a study tip.
