The Time-management thread

[Iversen]

I can understand why you need a tool to keep track of large projects where a lot of things have to be done in a very specific order AND be ready at very specific points in the process - else everything will come to a grinding halt and somebody will lose a lot of money (make sure it isn't YOU!). And I also remember such tools from my working life, where I involved in a number of IT projects as a 'consultant' in public service. But for me those tools have always just been ways of keeping track of who delivers what when, and I have never ever felt the need to use them for my own one person projects. The order of things was normally quite evident, and then I didn't need to write it down. Or it wasn't clear, and then the project should be thought through once again. A clear structure is of course also necessary in an IT application, but there the order of production may be given from the fact that you have to test that everything works which often means that you have to make subsegments before the structures they eventually will be used in. But even then I wouldn't use a tool to write down the order of production - either it's obvious, or I haven't understood structure of the project. Time-management tools are for me only relevant when you aren't alone about doing something, and you need a way of keeping everyone accountable.

And languages? It's obvious that you have to learn the auxiliary verbs before you learn the compound verbal forms in which they are used, and you should learn the present tense indicative before a subjunctive future which nobody has used since the 19. century. And if you learn from a textbook, then its author ought to tell you things in a sensible order. Once you are beyond the initial stage and have stopped using textbooks the order of things to learn less important, and then it's mostly a matter of getting things done at all.