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One of the most impactfult things I ever picked up was to put a rough estimate on every task I'm doing and then plan my day/week according to it. In its essence, its just timeboxing. But I kept getting better at estimating the real effort necessary to complete a task which in turn made me a lot better at prioritizing.

An important side effect is that it changed the way I work: I focus on the outline first and use the remaining time in my timebox to gradually refine my result. At the end of the timebox, I have the best working result I could achieve within my estimate.

The combination of timeboxing, better prioritizing, and outlining / starting with an end-to-end prototype did wonders for my productivity and stress levels.



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