Time management has always been a hard thing for me. In the past year I learned that I have ADHD, and it has caused me to take a new approach on how I should manage my time and energy. One of the hardest things for me is knowing what I need to be doing at a specific time. Lists don’t seem to work for me, my brain wants to start them all at once and I get nothing done. Time blocking seemed promising at first, but the time it took to block every individual task out was exhausting and felt like a waste of time. This lead me to create my own scheduling/task management tool called cronwave.

Cronwave is a task scheduling/time blocking utility that has completely changed how I do work and complete tasks. It runs on top of the awesome command line utility Taskwarrior. Taskwarrior allows me to input tasks quickly with attributes like when its due, when I want to start working on it, and the estimated time the task will take. A simple example of my workflow goes as such: I have a statics assignment due in two days and a task for my role as Director of International Project that I want to start some time tonight and should be due in a day. I would run

task add statics due:wednesday
task add email rotary due:tuesday
cronwave schedule

cronwave will take my tasks and schedule them around my classes and any other events I have going on. It will sort them by due date and also break up large tasks into manageable blocks. Say I now have a conflict and I have to move my tasks around. I run:

cronwave reschedule

This also works for tasks that i did not complete and need to be rescheduled to to the future. Once I am done with a task I run

cronwave done {task id}

where task id is the number assigned by task warrior. This will complete my task warrior task and delete the time blocks on the calendar. I plan to add a full calendar ui and features like google calendar integration. So far it has helped me be a lot more productive and never feel like I am falling behind