LYRICFLUENT
LYRICFLUENTHow To Manage Your Time More Effectively Lyrics by Addison Anderson Addison Anderson
Below, you will find the lyrics for How To Manage Your Time More Effectively by Addison Anderson.
In the summer of 1997
NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft landed on the surface of Mars
And began transmitting incredible, iconic images back to Earth
But several days in, something went terribly wrong
The transmissions stopped
Pathfinder was, in effect, procrastinating
Keeping itself fully occupied but failing to do its most important work
What was going on?
There was a bug, it turned out, in its scheduler
Every operating system has something called the scheduler
That tells the CPU how long to work on each task before switching
And what to switch to
Done right, computers move so fluidly
Between their various responsibilities
They give the illusion of doing everything simultaneously
But we all know what happens when things go wrong
This should give us, if nothing else, some measure of consolation
Even computers get overwhelmed sometimes
Maybe learning about the computer science of scheduling
Can give us some ideas about our own human struggles with time
One of the first insights is that all the time
You spend prioritizing your work
Is time you aren't spending doing it
For instance, let's say when you check your inbox
You scan all the messages
Choosing which is the most important
Once you've dealt with that one, you repeat
Seems sensible, but there's a problem here
This is what's known as a quadratic-time algorithm
With an inbox that's twice as full, these passes will take twice as long
And you'll need to do twice as many of them!
This means four times the work
The programmers of the operating system Linux
Encountered a similar problem in 2003
Linux would rank every single one of its tasks in order of importance
And sometimes spent more time ranking tasks than doing them
The programmers' counterintuitive solution
Was to replace this full ranking
With a limited number of priority 'buckets.'
The system was less precise about what to do next
But more than made up for it by spending more time making progress
So with your emails, insisting on always doing
The very most important thing first
Could lead to a meltdown
Waking up to an inbox three times fuller than normal
Could take nine times longer to clear
You'd be better off replying in chronological order, or even at random!
Surprisingly, sometimes giving up on doing things in the perfect order
May be the key to getting them done
Another insight that emerges from computer scheduling
Has to do with one of the most prevalent features
Of modern life: interruptions
When a computer goes from one task to another
It has to do what's called a context switch
Bookmarking its place in one task
Moving old data out of its memory and new data in
Each of these actions comes at a cost
The insight here is that there's a fundamental tradeoff
Between productivity and responsiveness
Getting serious work done means minimizing context switches
But being responsive means reacting anytime something comes up
These two principles are fundamentally in tension
Recognizing this tension allows us
To decide where we want to strike that balance
The obvious solution is to minimize interruptions
The less obvious one is to group them
If no notification or email requires a response
More urgently than once an hour, say
Then that's exactly how often you should check them. No more
In computer science, this idea goes by the name of interrupt coalescing
Rather than dealing with things as they come up
The mouse was moved?
A key was pressed?
More of that file downloaded?
The system groups these interruptions together
Based on how long they can afford to wait
In 2013, interrupt coalescing
Triggered a massive improvement in laptop battery life
This is because deferring interruptions lets
A system check everything at once
Then quickly re-enter a low-power state
As with computers, so it is with us
Perhaps adopting a similar approach
Might allow us users to reclaim our own attention
And give us back one of the things that feels so rare in modern life: rest
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