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Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Not only did I commit the cardinal sin of writing a “N Things” article, I even promised a part two that never surfaced. So, here’s the long-promised followup to “5 Time Management Hacks Worth Noting” from March this year, inspired by a recent Dumb Little Man post about creating more time in your day.

As I’ve become more enmeshed in running my company and trying to maintain a healthy interest in the surrounding world, keep a grip on the big picture, stay in touch with what’s around the corner while also ensuring I have clean underwear, my mum remembers she has a daughter and (dare I say it) getting some “me time”, the keen reader may have noticed I’ve had less time to blog over recent months. Poor time management in practice! However, I’ve managed to find a little more time in the day of late.

The key things have been setting a regular time and goal to do things (“blog once a day, first thing”), and scheduling in tasks. Rather than expect I’ll “go for a run sometime this week”, I’ll actually schedule it in for Tuesday afternoon, and suddenly… it gets done.

I’ve also suffered from multitask-focus-drift of late, branching off from task to task in a Choose Your Own Adventure style escapade, then forgetting what the overarching goal was. I started writing down my goal for the morning and afternoon (I operate on a maker’s schedule) and even writing down major sub-goals or separate tasks. Glancing at this notepad when I have thirty-seven tabs open and forget what I was doing really helps. It also helps to use multiple desktops within OS X to ‘hide’ unproductive stuff that can time-sink – I have two separate Firefox windows, TweetDeck and IRC are hidden, etc.

At the very least I’ve also learned to procrastinate productively; it’s got to the stage where pretty much everything I need to be doing has some productive value, so even if I’m procrastinating by answering emails, they’re emails that needed to be answered.

Until I invent a time machine, this will have to do.

A quick quote from Twitter’s Biz that I just saw (paraphrased): “Roller-coaster is a good description of a start-up. Sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes you want to throw up.” (Tweeted by Mark, and definitely resonated!)

Now that obligatory startup bit is over, I’d like to talk about running.

This picture (by mrhayata) is sadly not me, but it captures how running makes me feel. I started with a beginners’ group about three months ago (I always seem to get on better with hard stuff if I join groups) and after wheezing my way to a 30 second trot in week one, I am now entering my first 5K run in, ooh, about two weeks’ time.

I’m pretty scared, but also excited. Running is great, for me – at this stage, there’s measurable progress each and every time I run. I manage things now I don’t think I could ever have done. I get off the treadmill or return home and suddenly think wow, I ran for twenty-five minutes straight or wow, that was Arthur’s Seat or other such things. Sure, by my marathon-running flatmate’s standards, I’m barely even walking, but it’s still — shiny numbers going up, progress, and achievement. Microrewards are definitely how I motivate, and why I run.

I’m off to San Francisco, that hub of tech buzz and excitement, for Startup School, Astia Doing it Right Silicon Valley, and general plotting and madcap tomfoolery next week. In typical shoestring mode, I’m being sponsored to do Startup School by Informatics Ventures (woo!) and a mystery sponsor is putting me through Astia (double woo!) – it is heartwarming when people are this helpful.

There’s a group of us from Edinburgh heading over, and we’ll probably have some sort of meetup the day after Startup School, so watch this space or Hacker News for info.

I have a week to ‘kill’ between the two events and hope to, finally, do some proper sightseeing and exploring of the area. I’m hatching a plan that will relocate me to SF for at least some of next year, and my previous visits, while tons of fun (GDC especially), didn’t get me to really see the entire place in the way I had seen Edinburgh and decided “I could live here”.

We shall see. Anyway, if there are any events I should know about in the last week of October, or you want to buy me a pint, be my guest!

I use Remember the Milk, but I never use it to remember the milk.

Ironic.

Here’s why. I’m not a terribly good GTD-aholic. I am forever thankful to the day I absorbed the GTD principle of “don’t worry about stuff before you have to”, i.e. I schedule in tasks in RTM for the day I have to think about them and then forget completely. It’s fantastic. However, I still keep some pretty terrible habits kicking around: one of them is what my mum used to call “the big shelf”. I think visually, so it doesn’t matter if everything’s in heaps on the floor, as long as I remember which things are in which heap, I’m fine.

This pops up in RTM as todo-list-laziness. I have one list. “Inbox”. It contains all my tasks. This is partly exacerbated by the fact I mostly use RTM via the Gmail gadget which gives me no incentive to use multiple lists. But who cares. It’s fine as it is.

Until I want to make a shopping list, and my current system totally and utterly breaks. I can’t add shopping list items as individual tasks, so to speak; my system gets overcluttered and, since I’m date-driven, I basically have to add nonsensical tasks like “milk today” “eggs today”. Even if I created them in a new list that’d still be the case, though at least then I’d have some separation from actual to-dos. The only solution I can see within RTM, specifically date-driven RTM use, is to add a “Sainsbury’s” task and add my shopping list as a note. Makes it hard to see at a glance what I’ve got to buy, hard to note down suddenly-remembered items, etc.

Good thing I’m a paper junkie, really. It just struck me as extremely amusing that I can’t use an app called Remember the Milk to do just that.

Well, this is somewhat amazing. A tip off the Internet works!

Lifehacker recently picked up a story I’d read some months ago, but not really thought too deeply about, planning as I am to remain in this timezone for the immediate future. The story? How to reset your body clock by not eating for 16 hours.

We all know the theory about getting up early. Set your alarm for an early time every day. Get up without fail. Immediately do some exercise or take a shower to get the blood flowing. Even if you go to bed stupidly late, still get up at the same time. But somehow, it’s never quite worked for me. My early-morning willpower just can’t overcome the miasma of “I went to bed at 6am after a late night’s hacking and I can reprogram my alarm while entirely asleep”.

Something clicked when I read the Lifehacker piece, though. Maybe my recent cycle of work-late, bed-late, get-up-later, work-later, bed-later wasn’t due to lack of willpower in the morning, but due to my internal body clock drifting as a result of what I ate. Coincidentally I’d been keeping a food diary at the same time as a protracted fortnight of late working nights, and there it was, writ large in the data: I got up late when I’d eaten late.

OK, that’s clearly not the only factor. Perhaps the late night activity of my brain due to work was causing the drift, perhaps it’s a result of the numbing effects of BBC iPlayer programmes on teenage mothers, perhaps it was the weather. But this was something I could test.

Step one. Set a golden rule not to eat after 8pm. This was derived from the 16-hour idea, with supporting anecdotal evidence that a 12-hour fast was sufficient for some people. 8pm means getting up (and eating) at 8am. That’s four or five hours earlier than my drifted body clock was managing; my internal ‘alarm’ was set to a solid 12:15 for several months.

Step two. Obey golden rule. Simple enough; nothing but water after eight.

Step three. Set alarm, wake up, and (to ruin the scientific nature of this experiment) schedule meetings at 9am to force the issue.

Step four. Observe results.

It really is incredible. After about three days of not eating beyond 8pm I was getting up early just fine, and feeling way more alert too. I then pushed the rule a bit, working late and eating late, and tested to see when I would naturally wake up – 10am. That’s a reset of over two hours! I’m entirely sure that if I keep this up for another week or so, I’ll have a circadian rhythm in line with my actual timezone for the first time in years.

Way to go bodyhacking!