“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso

One of the things I love about programming is that there is a solution to every problem – well, most of them. One of my favorites is the Knapsack Problem.

If you don’t know what the Knapsack Problem is, here’s a brief one-liner:

Given a set of items, each with a weight and a value, determine which items to include in the collection so that the total weight is less than or equal to a given limit and the total value is as large as possible.

I’ve been trying to get myself productive over the past few months but have found myself to be consistently failing in doing multiple things. I think I’m one of those people who want to do everything – paint, play music, cook, workout, code and what not. And when I am not able to do “everything” I ended up being disappointed.

Over the past few week’s I’ve been trying to do thing’s in a bit different way and following which has been making me turn into a much more productive version of myself. I call this method the Knapsack Method.

What is the Knapsack Method?

In our day to day life, every activity that we want to do can be given two things – a weight & a value. Weight being how much time consuming it is going to be, and value being how much valuable that activity is for me.

Here’s what I came up with:

Activity	Weight	Value
Playing the Piano	1	6
Office Work	6	4
Painting	2	8
Cooking Breakfast	1	6
Cooking Lunch/Dinner	2	6
Workout	2	9
Clean the house	1	10
… and bunch of things like reading books and what not	…	…

Some rules that I followed were:

1. Weight is the number of hours I spend on that activity.
2. Value is how important that activity is for me i.e. how much fun do i get doing the activity
   1 – 4 : Less valuable
   4 – 6 : Moderate
   7 – 10 : Important

Last I checked, a day has 24 hours ( If only we could have more hours).

8 hours of sleep and 4 hours of relax time gives me about 12 hours of free time (I’m being generous here by giving myself 4 hour of slack) which gives me 12 points per day.

The objective here was to get the most value for these 12 points per day.

Some Nice Examples:

If I want to cook all 3 meals at home, I can go with –

_{Office Work + Breakfast + Lunch/Dinner + Workout + Playing the Piano = 12 points}

If I want to have more time at home, and maybe paint, I can skip cooking lunch and order it in the office and get –

Office Work + Breakfast + Workout + Playing the Piano + Painting = 12 points

On weekends, I can maybe add more things to make it interesting?

Breakfast + Running + Lunch/Dinner + Netflix + Clean the house = 12 points

The possibilities are just endless. All you have to do is write things down and then just try placing things together. One important thing to know is (which i learned the hard way)

“You can do anything, but not everything.” – David Allen

After every week, all you need to do is a small retrospective and see what went well, and what went wrong and then start over.

Now again, I’m not saying that this is the best way to get things done and be productive. It’s just another way of looking at things, which for me worked out really well! Hoping this is helpful for people who are struggling with getting productive and may they find their own “Knapsack Problem”

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem