This is the first post in a series about self-managament. It describes the content that I have in mind and the motivation for self-management.
Why manage yourself?
There are three great reasons to engage in self-management:
To ~reduce~ eliminate work-stress
To ensure you honour your commitments, both to yourself and to others.
To get more done.
In work and in life, no other person will even be on your side as much as you can be. It is your job to take ultimate responsibility for your life.
When it comes to creative endeavours like software development, system administration, managing projects or teams and even running an entire company, stress will be counterproductive. You may be able to cap bottles on a conveyor belt while stressed, there is no way you will be able to perform good creative work under stress. Stress prevents good creative intuitive ideas. Self-management allows you to do better work through stress-free productivity.
Taking responsibility for your work via effective self-management will allow you to have a complete overview of all your commitments, such that you will never again forget about pieces of work. Having such an overview also lets you be on time and mentally present for your in-person engagements.
Getting more done is a good reason to get into self-management as well, but it should definitely not be the most important one. You will get more done, but the other aspects will matter much more in terms of your overall effectiveness.
Table of Contents
Self-management is a big topic about which I have a lot to write, so this series may run long and this list may be updated in the future. This series will approach self-management from a practical perspective, with concrete tools in mind. The audience I have in mind is an ambitious and/or stressed engineer, technical leader, manager or executive.
These are the contents that I have in mind.
Intro: Why manage yourself (this post)
Pieces and tools
Capture (Intray)
Tickling (Tickler)
Calendar
Processing (Smos)
Reference system
Intray for capturing
Why Intray & Installation
Using intray online
Using the intray app
Using the intray command-line application
Using the intray android App
Capturing examples
Capturing instant messaging
Setting up intray in your prompt
Synchronisation and setting up your own intray server
Setting up intray using nix-home-manager
Smos for processing
Why smos & installation?
Getting started: Using smos as a list/tree manager
Getting started with smos for self-management: next actions and the next-action list
Processing examples, part 1
Waiting-for entries and the waiting-for list
Smos for org-mode users, part 1
Tickler for tickling
Why Tickler & Installation
Using tickler online
Using the tickler command-line application
Synchronisation and setting up your own tickler server
Setting up tickler using nix-home-manager
Context-based work with Smos
Tags for context-based work
Properties for context-based work
Working with Smos-query work
Processing examples
The someday maybe list
The projects list
The weekly review
The agenda in Smos
Clocking in smos
Processing examples, part 2
Setting up smos using nix-home-manager
Synchronisation & Setting up your own smos sync server
Optimising email
Setting up mutt with offlineimap and msmtp
Imapfilter to focus email into one account
Offlineimap to only download email once per day
Msmtpq to only send email once per day
Acknowledgements
Much of what I describe here draws inspiration from "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. The biggest difference between that book and this content is that this content is more oriented towards techies, power users, and software developers/system administrators/product leaders/technical leaders/engineering managers in particular. This content is also more opinionated and focused on the tooling in practice.