I was going to write a sort of yearnote last week, summing up 2023. I didn’t, in the end, mainly because I felt too tired of 2023 to want to write it. It was not the greatest of years of my life. In fact, I would put it down as probably the worst, all things considered. Even lockdown, with all its attendent insanity, had good moments. 2023 really doesn’t feel like it had many.
The first week of the year is always an odd when when you’re working for a company. It’s a time when quite a few people are going to be away, taking the chance of an extended break (if you time it well, you can basically get three to four weeks off).
It’s a little different when you’re not working. The danger is there is no “first week back” in the same way there’s no “last week”. The time can all blur into one miasma of semi-productive, semi-unproductive days. Which then turn into weeks.
Similarly the division between weekdays and weekends becomes something you have to actively preserve, rather than simply relying on a lack of work to magically create your weekend.
And it’s fair to say this week saw a slow start. But towards the end of the week, things picked up. I worked through what I wanted my goals to be for this quarter (and in fact this year). I also started testing Motion, which is an interesting task/calendar app which I like the look of.
What Motion does is automatically create blocks of time for your tasks. You prioritise them, put in deadlines and start dates, and an estimate of how long it will take to do the task. For bigger tasks which take longer than an hour, you can define “blocks” – the shortest block of time that you want to work on that task. Motion then goes off and puts the blocks on your calendar, effectively scheduling in all the work that you have to do.
It sounds more complex than it it, but the end result is pretty compelling: a complete schedule which lets you be clear at all times about what’s next. I started working with it at the end of the week and absolutely blasted through a bunch of stuff which had been lingering on my task list for ages.
Motion started off life as a calendar application and it still works well as one. It will connect to Google, iCloud and Microsoft (work and personal) calendars, and arranges your tasks around meetings. If a new meeting drops in, it will reschedule your tasks, and alert you if suddenly a task becomes impossible to do beyond its deadline.
It’s not cheap: $19 a month if you pay annually, or a stupid $34 a month if you go monthly, I probably won’t subscribe at this point, as I need to watch where my money is going, but I would definitely be tempted in the future.
