When I was a developer, I could work on a single task for several days. It was a bliss. When I started doing architecture, I noticed I had to do a lot of multi-tasking. At the very least, there will be multiple developers working on different tasks, whom I will support. Moreover, I need to talk to testers about testability, integration strategy etc. At the more senior end of the architect role, I need to talk to business stakeholders about product strategies and so on. And sometimes all this happens on a single day. Frank Buschmann wrote a nice article demonstrating A Week in the Life of an Architect, where he emphasizes keeping focus over the course of the week to ensure progress.

Thus, around the time I started architecting, I also started looking for some time management techniques:

• The first one was the Pomodoro technique, which is dead-simple: divide your time into 25+5 Minute slots, where you work without interruptions for 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break. It is a small step with very high gains. Although I now find it better to finish a task or a set of tasks, since the artificial break causes an unnecessary context switch.
• The second one I learned was Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. It is a quite comprehensive technique aiming at organizing almost your whole life. It resembles a full-fledged real-time OS scheduler with tasks in “blocked/waiting” and “runnable” modes that help you focus on the “runnable” tasks where you may achieve some progress at that precise moment. GTD also has a periodical review phase, where you go over your tasks thinking about relevance and trim down the unnecessary parts, or take up tasks that you had pushed into a “maybe later” queue. Another aspect I like about this method is its connecting of daily routine to the long-term objectives. David Allen offers a lot of material on GTD, I think the most useful one is his talk at Google. Finding a tool that matches the comprehensiveness of GTD is difficult. Evernote is an option, but not if you don’t want to keep corporate-confidential or personally sensitive stuff on a public cloud. Outlook could be an option, if you are not bothered by keeping personal stuff on a corporate PC. I employ a lightweight version of GTD with multiple tools for different purposes.
• A third method I learned is Personal Kanban, which is somewhat similar to the Kanban Board I mentioned in my previous post. But besides that, I don’t use it on a daily basis.

If you’re doing architecture, I highly recommend following a time management technique, maybe these, or maybe other ones you would recommend to me.

In addition to the techniques, it’s good to maintain a view on what kind of activities you are involved in. The IN-ON distinction can offer some guidance here. An healthy week of an architect should contain some IN-activities, where you keep in touch with the daily work, so you don’t become an ivory tower architect and some ON-activities, where you work on building and implementing a vision, so your architecture remains future-proof.

A final thing about time management I experience is that I’m not a machine :-). All of these techniques can bring a mental load, as they always prescribe what I should be doing at any given moment. This lack of freedom can be quite constraining. My solution is to let myself do some chaotic activity now and then. The key thing is to not to get demoralized by such deviations and to get back on the wagon.