timebot6

Last week, before the weather turned cold – and wet – I decided (on the backside of a bad cold) to get out of the office and put in a chunk of time on my long-delayed new deck’s railing.

Simple project, but it was my first recent (past age 70) real test of “chunking” (in more formal project circles, this would be WBS (Work Breakdown Structure).

The trick was not to attempt progress completion.  I was only interesting in one outcome; giving within easy completion range the next day.  About 90-minutes worth of work.

Work Feels Good

Outside, on a warm winter day, working felt really good.  Light breeze, about 64F, and very bright sunlight.  So much, my shirt began to warm a bit.

Remembering back to some “walking tai chi” videos, I did the work (which was not brain loading) with particular attention to my balance and flow.  I’m sure, from 30-feet away, it would likely look silly.  Who does Skilsaw ballet?

A bit more wind and the sun was putting the workspace in the shade.  And having a cold, I hit my milestone and came into my office.

There – another gunny sack of emails waiting – I was amazed as how nice the warm office felt and how nice it would be to return to “Idea Land” and let my fingers “do the working.”  (click)

Which gets us (thank heaven, at last) to the point.

I decided to ask my AI stack if anyone had studied this notion (going from brain work, to process work, to manual work) previously to see if it improved performance.  Especially since I had just figured out (OK, I’m slow) that this was a pretty nice way to roll.  Here’s what the stack offered:

“Yes—people have studied this. And what you’re noticing has a real footing in cognitive science, with one important clarification:

Random task-switching is usually bad. Intentional task rotation is often good.

The distinction is simple: frantic switching fragments attention. Structured rotation restores it.

There are at least four mechanisms that explain why mixing 4+ distinctly different work modes across a day can feel like an “acuity upgrade”:

First is incubation. When you step away from a problem, your brain keeps processing it in the background and often returns a cleaner solution. This is why switching from writing to planning to correspondence can feel like coming back “sharper” rather than merely rested.

Second is attention restoration. Focused desk work burns what psychologists call directed attention. A physically different task, especially outdoors, refills that tank. Hand work on railings isn’t just “exercise.” It’s a sensory reset: depth cues, distance vision, proprioception, changing light, real-world textures. That combination acts like a cognitive rinse cycle.

Third is micro-recovery. A change of posture, a change of visual distance, and a change of demand type reduces fatigue before it becomes full burnout. You may not feel “tired,” but performance still drifts. Rotation interrupts that drift.

Fourth is interleaving. In learning science, mixing different types of problems improves long-run performance and transfer. A day that alternates writing, computation, planning, and physical work becomes a kind of interleaved cognitive training. You’re not just producing output. You’re conditioning flexibility.

There is a catch: switching has a cost. If you rotate too often, you pay a re-entry tax and end up scattered. The sweet spot is switching at natural boundaries—after a deliverable chunk, or when you’re stuck and spinning for ten minutes.

So the practical principle for time-engineering is this:

Rotate tasks to change the kind of brain you’re using, not just the topic.

A “high-acuity day” isn’t one long marathon of a single mode. It’s a sequence of different engines taking turns pulling the load: deep work, structured work, social work, and physical work. Done deliberately, that rotation doesn’t reduce productivity. It multiplies it.”

Then Another TimeTool Popped Up

In our conversation, AI had advised me to “stop after 10 minutes of being stuck.”

I don’t get stuck for more than 20-second intervals, so I challenged the AI to cite source OR reveal that AIs have just “noticed how human/carbons really work.”  The confession?

“It’s not an “AI invention.” It’s a carbon pattern that shows up in several research lines, and it also shows up in how experienced practitioners manage real work.

Where it comes from:

1. 1. Cognitive fixation / mental set
      When you’re stuck, you’re often trapped in one framing (“mental set”). Stepping away breaks fixation and lets a different representation surface. That’s the logic behind “incubation” effects in creativity/problem-solving research.

   2. Switch-cost + diminishing returns
      Task switching has a cost, so switching constantly is bad. But once you’re stuck, you’re paying a cost anyway: time is passing with little progress. Past that point, switching can become the cheaper option (even with re-entry cost). Classic work on task switching documents the reconfiguration cost, which is exactly why we want a rule for when switching is worth it.

   3. Breaks restore attention
      There’s evidence that breaks (often embedded inside task rotation) improve fatigue/vigor and can help performance, especially when attention has been depleted. So “stuck” often correlates with “attention is depleted” even if you don’t feel sleepy.

   4. A practical craft rule: “When you start looping, stop.”
      Writers, programmers, engineers, and traders all independently develop the same heuristic: if you’re rereading the same paragraph, refactoring the same function, or running the same mental loop without new information, you’re no longer working—you’re grinding. That’s the moment to change mode: take a walk, do a physical task, answer correspondence, or shift to a different subproblem.

So: AI didn’t “notice” this so much as AI can name it cleanly. “Stuck” is a reliable, observable signal that you’ve hit either (a) fixation, (b) depletion, or (c) missing information. In all three cases, the best next move is often a deliberate switch—not to escape work, but to re-enter it with fresh cognitive leverage.

Pushing AI

“OK, fine, normal domain-gradients, but where did 10 minutes come from. You were rather specific.”

“Yeah — the “10 minutes” isn’t a magic number from a single definitive study. It’s a rule-of-thumb that comes from combining two realities:

1. 1. Switching has a real cost (you lose time reorienting), so you don’t want to bail instantly. The task-switching literature consistently shows there’s a measurable “reconfiguration” penalty when you change tasks.

   2. Grinding while stuck has a cost too (time passes with no new information). In creativity/problem-solving, “incubation” effects show that stepping away can improve solutions once you’ve hit fixation—so waiting a little, then switching, is often better than forcing it.

So “10 minutes” is basically a practical threshold: long enough to confirm you’re in a loop, short enough to prevent an hour of wheel-spinning. Some people use 5, some use 15. The principle is what matters:

I try to always avoid “stuckness” – which can now and then point back to limited tools or resources – which could have been resolved in the planning process.

But these are useful, and maybe useful TimeTools to remember.  In fact, let’s call it?

Timese Takeouts

• TimeTool #1: Chunking to a restartable milestone

• TimeTool #2: Task rotation for acuity

• TimeTool #3: The “Stuckness trigger” as an instrumentation event
  You can build a whole taxonomy: TimeTools for planning, execution, recovery, review.

Consider yourself empowered,

George

Comments are always welcome!

There’s a particular sound you can hear, if you listen for it.

It’s not the whine of a motor. Not the hum of a transformer. Not even the neighbor’s leaf-blower doing its annual audition for a job at Boeing.

It’s the faint, constant tread of the Daily Hamster.

You know the critter. Lives in a wheel. Runs like hell. Never arrives. And somehow still ends up tired.

I’ve been thinking about the Daily Hamster because I’ve spent most of my working life trying to do the opposite: build time, protect time, and occasionally recover time that got stolen by people who were very good at stealing it.

Time Engineering exists because I finally decided to put all the time-work in one place. Not productivity hacks. Not hustle culture. Not “rise at 4:00 a.m. and ice-bathe your soul.” I’m talking about practical, engineering-style time creation: constraints, systems, feedback loops, and design choices that make tomorrow easier than today.

And the first obstacle to time creation is almost always the same: the hamster wheel.

The Wheel Is Built to Feel Like Progress

The Daily Hamster is seductive because it mimics accomplishment.

You answer a few emails. You check a few headlines. You scan a few charts. You pay a bill. You move a task from “to-do” to “done.” You get the dopamine of closure.

Then the wheel speeds up.

The inbox refills. The headlines refresh. The task list breeds overnight like rabbits with a grant.

Here’s the trick: the wheel produces motion, not traction.

Traction is when your effort creates a durable asset. Something that keeps paying you back: a system, a template, a routine, a skill, a relationship strengthened, a tool organized, a process improved, a backlog reduced in a way that stays reduced.

Motion is what the hamster gets: a feeling of effort without forward travel.

The Daily Hamster doesn’t just waste time. It consumes the very kind of time you need to build a better life: uninterrupted time, attention, and recovery.

The Hamster’s Three Favorite Foods

The hamster doesn’t run on willpower. It runs on inputs. And it has favorite inputs.

1) The “Urgent” Label
If something is labeled urgent, most people treat it as important. This is backwards. Urgent is often just someone else’s schedule colliding with your day.

Real importance usually isn’t urgent. It’s quiet. It waits. It’s the work you do when nobody is watching: planning, maintenance, deep work, hard conversations, preventative care, writing, learning.

The hamster loves urgency because urgency justifies speed. And speed is how you stay on the wheel.

2) Interruption-as-Normal
The modern world sells interruption as connectivity. Phone buzzes, app pings, news alerts, “quick question,” “got a minute,” “can you look at this right now?”

Every interruption has a hidden cost: restart time. The mental thrash of switching contexts. The loss of thread. The erosion of deep work.

A day with twenty small interruptions doesn’t feel catastrophic. It feels like life. But it’s a slow leak in the tire. Eventually you’re rolling on the rim and wondering why everything takes so much effort.

3) The Myth of Catching Up
There is no catching up. Not in a world where the feed never ends and the to-do list is fed by other people’s expectations.

The hamster’s promise is: run a little faster and you’ll get ahead. The reality is: run faster and the wheel speeds up.

The moment you accept there is no “finish line” for daily inputs, you stop trying to win a game that cannot be won. That’s when you can start designing your own game.

How the Daily Hamster Shows Up in Real Life

The Daily Hamster isn’t always obvious. Sometimes it wears a suit. Sometimes it looks responsible. Sometimes it sounds like virtue.

It says:

• “I’ll start the big project after I clear the small stuff.”

• “I just need to check the news real quick.”

• “Let me respond so I’m not behind.”

• “If I don’t stay on top of everything, it’ll all fall apart.”

• “I’ll relax later, after I finish… everything.”

And the day ends with the same strange feeling: you were busy, but you didn’t move.

That feeling is diagnostic.

When you feel it two days in a row, you are not “behind.” You are on a wheel.

The Engineering Question

When an engineer sees a system that produces heat, noise, and wear but no useful output, the question is not “How do we run it harder?”

The question is: Why does this system exist, and what would we replace it with?

The Daily Hamster exists because most people never explicitly design their time. They inherit it. They accept default settings. They allow external inputs to become the organizing principle.

Time creation starts when you stop treating your day like an open container for other people’s demands and start treating it like a designed system.

That means you need boundaries. Not as a moral stance, but as a physical reality. A bridge has boundaries. A circuit has boundaries. A garden has boundaries. Anything that works has boundaries.

The First Escape Hatch: Build a “No-Input Hour”

If you do one thing to escape the Daily Hamster, do this:

Create a no-input hour.

No news. No email. No social feed. No new tasks. No messages. No “just checking.”

One hour a day where you don’t consume or react.

In that hour, you do one of three things:

• Build: create something durable (write, plan, design, organize, prepare).

• Maintain: prevent future breakdown (repair, file, clean, set up, automate).

• Recover: restore the machine (walk, breathe, stretch, nap, pray, think).

The magic isn’t the hour. The magic is the rule: no inputs.

Because the hamster lives on inputs. Starve the inputs and the wheel slows down.

The Second Escape Hatch: Replace “To-Do” With “Deliverables”

A to-do list is an invitation to nibble. It’s dozens of small rewards and no coherent direction.

Deliverables are different. A deliverable is a finished thing with an edge: it can be used, shipped, installed, published, fixed, completed.

When you organize your day around deliverables, you stop measuring success by activity and start measuring success by completion.

Ask yourself:

• What deliverable would make tomorrow easier?

• What deliverable would reduce recurring pain?

• What deliverable would produce lasting value?

Even one deliverable per day, consistently, will bankrupt the hamster over time.

The Third Escape Hatch: Decide What You’re Not Doing

This is the hard one, because it’s emotional.

The hamster wheel is often fueled by fear: fear of missing something, fear of disappointing someone, fear of losing control, fear of being irrelevant.

Time engineering requires a different kind of courage: the willingness to let some things slide on purpose.

Not because you’re lazy. Because you’re choosing.

If you don’t choose what you’re not doing, the world will choose it for you. And the world will choose “everything.”

The Quiet Payoff

The best part of escaping the Daily Hamster isn’t productivity. It’s a different internal climate.

You stop feeling hunted by the day.

You get back the sense that life is not a series of obligations, but a sequence of choices.

You start to notice something else, too: most of what you used to consider “necessary” was just habitual. Just default. Just noise.

And once you see the wheel for what it is, it becomes difficult to climb back on.

Which is the whole point.

Because we don’t get more life by running faster. We get more life by building time—quietly, intentionally, and with enough engineering humility to admit that the first design we inherited was never built for human flourishing.

It was built for hamsters.  (We get a pass – we’ve been too busy on the wheel for a redesign!)

And you’re not a hamster.  And you can design.

Consider yourself empowered,

George@Ure..net

And no one ever talks about it.

We’re about to change that.

Over time…