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Seen on Technology Review: Blogs: Ed Boyden’s blog: How to Think:

Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out?

As part of my 2008 campaign to “Create It,” I’ve decided to try to build a clock of my own design. This is, quite frankly, crazy. As a matter of fact, I have little experience with anything that I might use to create this project other than some halfway-decent programming sense.

Anyway, on to what I have in mind: A ring, on a square board roughly two feet wide. The ring acts a sort of pie chart of time, and updates in one hour increments (no minutes in my clock, I don’t believe in sweating the small stuff!). At 12:00 midnight, the clock is completely green. The clock then begins turning red, one hour block at a time. At noon, the ring turns yellow, and the process repeats until it cycles back to completely green again at midnight. The drawing above shows 4:00 PM under this system.

I’m thinking of using LEDs to light up the clock face, and I plan on picking some up to play with the next chance I get.

…or, at the very least, it’s usable. Here’s a screenshot:

The earlier screenshot that I posted was launched with window.openDialog, but I’m still having trouble getting Chrono to launch in its own window so that everything “just works” — so instead, I’ll be using it from inside Firefox, which I have open most of the time anyway. I even have a bookmark to go to it right away. I figured that I’d go over everything I’ve done, and describe what I’ve learned and what I could do to improve this project (but probably won’t). (more…)

I’ve been busy working on my 2008 theme, “Create it” — long fascinated by the power of XUL, I’ve decided to use it to improve my personal scheduling system. Here’s a screenshot of what I currently use, an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet:

And, here’s what I’m planning on replacing it with, a Javascript-automated, XUL scheduler:

Pretty spiffy. No, it’s not exactly Sunbird, but it could possibly make a decent Sunbird extension. One of the things I’ve had a lot of difficulty getting my mind around are the various security restrictions and variable scope oddities — I spent a lot of time trying to determine where my user settings (and by “extension” my chrome directory) actually were, since I’ve moved the same Firefox installation across three computers already.

There’s an interesting post on Marginal Revolution regarding personal discount rates. I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while. A lot of what I’ve read on personal finance just doesn’t include the concept.

I tried looking around Wikipedia for an overview of the philosophy of discount rates, but couldn’t find one. The closest thing there is the article on time preference:

In economics, time preference (or “discounting”) pertains to how large a premium a consumer will place on enjoyment nearer in time over more remote enjoyment.

There is no absolute distinction that separates “high” and “low” time preference, only comparisons with others either individually or in aggregate. Someone with a high time preference is focussed substantially on their well-being in the present and the immediate future compared to the average, while someone with low time preference places more emphasis than average on their well-being in the further future.

This is a bit difficult to digest, to put it mildly. The basic idea is simply that $1.00 today is worth more than $1.00 a year from now. Because you have to pass “a year from now” in order to get to “fifty years from now,” $1.00 at the end of fifty years is worth even less than $1.00 at the end of a year.

Having a discount rate of 0 has some unusual and bizarre consequences (I vaugely remember some of the funnier examples from college). Suppose you knew that you were going to live for exactly another 40 years, had a consistent personal discount rate of 0, and were completely unconcerned with the state of the world after your death. If someone were to offer you $0.01 of interest to borrow all of your money for 39 years, 364 days, you should accept this offer, because you’d have more money at a greater (present) value than if you didn’t! Likewise, if helping a friend had any value to you at all, then you should be okay with lending $1000 interest-free to them for the same period of time, since it would still be worth $1000 to you in the future! Who wants to live like that? Even in an environment free from physical risk, a discount rate of 0 makes no sense.

Yet, a lot of personal financial advice seems to assume a discount rate of 0. Consider various examples (see About.com, the SEC) extolling people to cut back on their daily cup of coffee because of the amount that money could grow into. Yes, if you can cut “just” $1.00 a day in your expenses, and place the money at the end of the year into stocks getting a return of 10% for 40 years, you’ll have approx $16,519. But, take into consideration a discount rate of 3% and the $16,519 in forty years is worth just $5,064!

Now, turning $365 into $5,064 is still impressive. Very impressive. But it’s a far cry from turning $365 into $16,519 (a 1287% return versus a 4425% return). And don’t forget that you have foregone something that presumably had a present value of at least $365 to begin with! 3% is probably too low a discount rate, IMHO.

It’s very easy to turn down the mental abstraction of a cup of coffee. What’s more difficult to grasp in discussions like this is what that actually means on a day to day basis — how a cup of coffee may be part of a routine that involves talking with friends, or sitting around and thinking about life. Even more disturbing is how such examples miss the forest for the trees — some financial writers have pointed out that starting with bigger expenses in your budget just makes more sense! If you can cut $100 a month by living in a smaller home, then the $30 a month from a daily coffee is no longer so impressive, or so important. If spending $5 dollars a day sends a signal to others that boosts your productivity and/or earnings by a greater amount, then do it. I believe in living frugally, but I also believe in having fun in the here and now.

I was going through my bookmarks, and found this via Collision Detection, an article which has had quite an impact on my thinking on some matters:

While yielding to temptation can certainly be harmful, this article argues that overcontrol and excessive farsightedness (hyperopia) can also have negative long-term consequences. In particular, we propose that, with the passage of time, choices of virtue over vice (e.g., work over pleasure) evoke increasing regret.

- “Repenting Hyperopia“, Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan

I probably would not have gone to ACEN 2007 if I hadn’t read this. On the other hand, there are some things in the past that I wish I had worked harder at, as well as past tasks that I wish I had just completely neglected (case in point: I spent a lot of time, money, and effort deciding which college to attend. My friend Scott picked UIC mostly on the basis of its location, and partly at random. I think he made a better choice by far; I also probably would have gotten more out of the experience if I had done less homework and gone to some parties from time to time).

In my last post on personal time management, I presented time as a sort of “funnel of certainty” with events far in the future being very uncertain, events in the near future being fairly certain, events happening right now as being entirely certain, and events in the past becoming progressively less certain. I also gave a fairly broad definition of what an event is. I’m now going to present some thoughts on goals, and what makes certain events important for a person. Once again, I’m thinking as a write, and these ideas are still very rough.

A goal is a type of event. It is something that we want to happen in the future. While some people may indicate that a goal must have a measurable end result or tangible finish, or say that a goal must have some sort of psychological impact (”It must be realistic but still a bit of a stretch”), I consider anything that is desired to occur the future to be a goal. All of the following can be goals under this definition:

• Becoming an immortal god
• Eating dinner
• Washing the dishes
• Going for a walk
• The sun will rise tomorrow
• Playing a chess game

Note that the chance of a goal actually occurring does not change whether an event is a goal or not. Goals under this new definition are anything from certain to impossible.

Although humans have the ability to multitask, this ability is severely limited. The goals of “walking around the mall” and “chewing bubble gum” can easily occur simultaneously for the vast majority of human beings. But as mentioned in the last time management post, the goals of “vacationing in Las Vegas” and “vacationing in London” are mutually exclusive and contradictory. For completeness, it’s possible that some goals may be more likely to occur together without any cause and effect relationship between them - as a personal, I usually play a video game while exercising on an exercise bike.

Of course, dependencies do exist among goals. Suppose my goal is to become a famous actor. I might start by working toward the goal of taking theater classes, then being in some small live productions, and working my way up into movies and building a personal brand. On the other hand, I might just wait to be discovered as a great actor by a movie executive. Or, I could produce an amateur movie and post it online (YouTube?). Regardless of if I wait for a lucky break, produce a full movie, or start posting to YouTube, taking an acting class will probably help — but only if it does prior to completing those activities. Other dependencies are not dependent upon order: If your goal is to have a simple, four-legged chair, and you’re in possession of all the parts, all of those parts must be assembled, but it most likely doesn’t matter which leg is attracted to the seat first.

To summarize, here are the relationships that a goal may have to any other goal:

• Null - The goals have no or virtually no expected affect on each other
• Complimentary - The goals are more likely to occur simultaneously than separately
• Contradictory - The goals are more likely to occur separably than simultaneously
• Dependent - A partial or complete cause and effect relationship exists between one goal and the other; this may or may not make the “cause” goal a subgoal of the “effect” goal. It is not necessarily true that a dependent goal cannot also be complimentary or contradictory, and dependent goals can be either order-sensitive or order-insensitive.

I’m not satisfied with the current state of personal time management. I think it’s just fundamentally wrong, and something that could benefit from a probabilistic approach. So, I’ve decided to start from square one and create my own system of time management; I could certainly use one. The ideas I’m writing down are rough, untested, and unconventional; take them with a grain of salt until they’ve led somewhere useful, and bear with just a tiny bit of kookery until then, since I’ll admit that my knowledge of time management comes mostly from observing conventional time management tools rather than reading literature.

First of all, I consider time to be a finite resource into which events may be placed. I will define what an “event” is shortly. Time is not a tangible resource, nor is it a physical thing. Although modern physics tells us that time may be experienced differently by different observers, I take time as a constant, since people do not typically move at relativistic speeds relative to one another in every day life. Time can be measured by the passing of events.

An event is anything that takes up some amount of time. An exceptionally durable rock remaining motionless and unchanging for tens of thousands of years is an event. So is a person blinking. Events can be thought of as consisting of other, smaller events, such as the rock remaining motionless and unchanging for an hour, or the first twitch of an eyelid. The present can considered an atomic, universal event which consists of the state of everything. Events closer to the present are more certain to occur than those further way. If an eyelid goes down, it is almost certain to go back up next. If the rock is in front of me now, it almost certainly will not be halfway across the earth a minute from now. It follows that present actions have a greater potential to affect events which are further into the future. Past events are also uncertain, in that the further back in time an event is, the more difficult it is to determine the nature of the event; this is of less interest for time management, except to the extent that we can use a record of the past to inform future decisions. To this extent, we can take past events as recorded as they are observed, and consider this record to be “certain.”

Because events can be broken into subevents, the creation of such subevents makes those events more likely to occur — A seed planted makes a tree more likely to grow and live out its entire lifecycle in a particular location, for example. Because events do not occur in a vacuum, they may require a certain environment in order to occur with any reasonable probability, and may therefore require prerequisite events which are not subevents. The creation of Earth is a prerequisite to forests growing on its surfaces, but the creation of Earth is not a part of the trees growing (but the growing trees may considered be a subevent of the existence of the Earth).

Implicit in the above is that more than one event can occur simultaneously. However, some events cannot reasonably occur together. Others are simply unlikely to occur together. It is not possible for a person to spend a week vacationing simultaneously in Japan and Florida. These can be considered contradictory events.

All of this means that any system that assumes the certainty of future events cannot be satisfactory for time management. One of the things that has persistently annoyed me about Sunbird is that it assumes that future scheduled events inevitably occur (it also has a less than impressive concept of the present, limited merely to the current day).

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for event, one of the definitions given is an entry within the iCalendar standard, defined in the IETF’s RFC 2445. Although I’ve only given a quick glance to this specification, it does not appear to support an uncertain view of time. A new file format therefore makes sense given the current environment.

Browsing through various pages on project management on Wikipedia, the thoughts I’ve outlined above bear at least a superficial resemblance to the thinking behind Event Chain, but with a different emphasis.