An Active Working folder to minimize tasks switching overhead
Makzan’s Dispatch 2020 week 20
In this multi-tasks world, our time is split into fragments. Yet our highest productivity time happens when we single task and focus on the deliverables. So I work on single tasks in serial. But there are overheads between tasks.
Overhead happens when we try to resume a task. We ask:
Where are my files?
Where are the reference emails, chat logs?
What decisions we have already made?
What’s next decision needed in order to deliver?
To flight the overhead and minimize the switching time, I use an Active Working folder strategy. I pin this folder as the first item in my finder sidebar. It contains all the deliverables that I have to do recently. Each folder is named in the “YYYY-MM-DD Summary” convention.
The date is the deadline of the delivery date, in ISO 8601 date format for ascending sorting. Each delivery folder contains all the materials, references, emails that I need to finish and deliver the task. They are accessible and collected together so that I have the context whenever I resume the task. This highly reduces the overhead time wasted.
Whenever I have done and delivered the task, I move it into archives. So when I'm visiting this archives folder occasionally, I have a done list that I can celebrate what I have finished and delivered.
Links worth sharing
What a single div can do?
https://a.singlediv.com/
This is a gallery full of creative illustrations drawn by using one single DIV element.
What is a resilient website? (with Jeremy Keith)
https://aquestionofcode.com/60-what-is-a-resilient-website-jeremy-keith/
Jeremy Keith explains why rebranding the term progressive enhancement into a “resilient website”. The idea is to provide core features and essential content to everyone.
Pose Animator
https://pose-animator-demo.firebaseapp.com/camera.html
Allow camera access and have fun with it.
Pose Animator runs TF.js FaceMesh and PoseNet models to animate SVG illustrations with camera feed / static images.
Flexbox will have gap
https://web.dev/flexbox-gap/
We have `grip-gap` for CSS grid. We will have `gap` for Flexbox too.
We may have aspect-ratio CSS property in the future.
What's one idea that changed the way you live?
This is a twitter thread that contains life wisdom and gems.
Here are my selections:
What is your favorite life wisdom and lesson learned? Would you mind sharing with me as well?
Until next week,
Thomas Mak
