Over the years I have found that keeping the my own tasks context, for me, is one of the most important things to do when working. And by working I mean any complex task.

Specially because complext tasks must pause because of course you can’t build Rome in one day. I took inspiration from computer schedulers, where you save the context ( registers and stack information ) to run the process later.

So here is the checklist:

  • Define the available time that will be used on the task
  • Set an alarm to trigger 3 or 5 minutes for the end of the time, use this minutes to write down the context.
  • Get basic information about task:
    • If available, the past context should have the pointers
    • Reference DOC ( paper, youtube video, book, instructions, etc )
    • If exists, get the local checklist
    • Do the activity
  • When the alarm rings
    • write down the current status and if there is a local list write down the status on it
    • plan the next slot:
      • what is the minimum time to work on this?
      • add the likely work item or slot of time to the pending list
      • If we could or is necessary, add it to the scheduled slot

There will be an overhead and is hard to get traction on that but after you get it going it really helps.