Time Management

[mikecasas]

As a follow up to issue #1, how do you manage your time to accomplish all that you do? How many hours a day do you sleep?

[creationix]

Well, for starters, I've stopped checking my github notifications and just now saw this. :P

[creationix]

But seriously, there are only so many hours in a day, it's a fixed resource that we all have equal amounts of. I love the wisdom of the late Robert D. Hales when he said:

When you cannot do what you have always done, then you only do what matters most.

Taking away from sleep is an easy solution at first, but eventually that catches up and hurts health and reduces productivity. I wear a fitbit every night to track my sleep so I can draw strong correlations to my bad days with my lack of sleep for several nights in a row. It turns out that getting enough sleep is one of those things that matters most. I aim to get 7 hours of sleep a night but average more like 6.5 hours.

I have to let go of things that aren't most important. These days I spend a lot of time with my family, I have 6 kids and am supporting my wife to start med school soon. I've not spoken at a conference in a while and don't do as much open source outside my day jobs that often involve open source work.

My most popular project by far was nvm, but I've deferred to someone else to maintain it for the last several years and turned off my notifications for it. Recently I even transferred ownership to an org https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm. My luvit project is in a bit of anarchy at the moment where I'm still considered lead, but others often maintain it more than me. I'm generous with commit rights to people who have shown interest in helping out.

I strive to live by the words of Dallin H. Oaks when he said:

We should begin by recognizing the reality that just because something is good is not a sufficient reason for doing it. The number of good things we can do far exceeds the time available to accomplish them. Some things are better than good, and these are the things that should command priority attention in our lives.

To make sure we have enough time dedicated to things that really matter, my family has set several goals/schedules. Each of the kids is allowed one-on-one time with each parent and both parents once a month (they have paper tokens to track). We have family night once a week where we spend a couple hours together and take time doing different parts of the activity (singing, playing games, eating treats, etc) We try to schedule twice a month trips to our local religious temple (either San Antonio or Dallas, I'm in Austin) to have time to mediate. We visit my parents almost monthly (about 6 hour drive). One meal a day we try to all eat together and sit at the table.