A brief guide on time management
2023-11-03
Everyone's day has the same 24 hours and yet some people seem to make way more of it than others. Some might even say that they have superhuman powers, found a secret formula to distort time or just sacrifice on sleep and other necessities. And in some cases that surely is the case, but the true gamechanger actually is a careful amount of planning to get the most out of the time you're willing to spend. So, let's take a look at some general concepts and try to integrate them with everyday life...
The ultimate goal for maximum productive rather obviously is to plan every single second of your day - and before you say that's totally unrealistic and leave, please here me out. Sure, almost nobody does it like this and those who do likely won't be very happy, because especially the spontaneous meet-ups with friends or the unplanned after-work beer with a colleague are the events that are surprisingly fun and make everyday interesting. However, there also are some points in favour of planning that we shouldn't overlook altogether. First and foremost, knowing what to do every single second allows you to get all the work you want to do actually done, which is a huge productivity boost and the main reason personal assistants still exist. But the benefits gone beyond this, not having to think about what to do next and not worrying to forget something important for example allows you fully focus on the task currently at hand and be in the present with all your brain power. A predetermined structure also reduces unnecessary decision fatigue, which in case you haven't heard about it is the phenomenon of our decisions getting worse the more we have to decide, so that we can make more good decisions about what actually matters instead of trying to find a slot for our weekly grocery shopping.
Thus, a good middleground to settle with is to apply a concept called time blocking , where you create appointments in your calendar for things that matter to you, but only those that really do. This can be reading a book, meeting a class mate again after 10 years or starting your million-dollar startup - the only thing that matters is that it is something actually important to you. With this trick alone, you will probably get really good at making room for all the tasks you are familiar with and would like to work on, but that you end up forgetting about in the everyday stress. But what about the big project you always wanted to start, but never have? Well, that's where the 3-minute-rule comes into play. Generally, we don't start with something new or challenging, because we natually fear failure, but forget that if we never start, we also never even have to chance to succeed. Therefore, I recommend you to give the things that seem too big to tackle just 3 minutes a day, but actually spend these 3 minutes on them. Once you do, you're very likely to find out that they aren't as bad as you thought and starting really was the biggest challenge.
Now that you have to capability to work on everything you always wanted, you might start to struggle with finding time for them - even using the time blocking concept. Thankfully, there also is a trick to at least make room for some more activities and it is called Parkinson's law . It simply describes that every activity will inevitably fill the time allocated to it and over time also get finished during it. This means that if we plan to wash the dishes for 3 hours, we probably will find a way to spend that time, but it also means that if we only allocate 15 minutes to this task, we'll manage to cramp it into that time period with a bit of trial and error. By applying it primarly to the tasks we don't like but also those we do and giving them each a little less time than they normally require, we'll find ways to make them work with this reduced time over the following weeks and months, ultimately making room for additional things to be done.
Everything explained so far might make total sense to you, but I still haven't given you a practical guide to make it work with everyday life - so, let's change that. What I really like and worked for me and everyone I recommended it to was thinking about the ideal day first, making it work and then starting to plan the ideal week . Your life is made up of a series of ordinary days, but once you have an amazing ordinary day, you'll probably also have an amazing life. Just sit down for a few minutes, figure out what your ideal normal day should like and reserve space for the important activities (including time to relax) in your calender, while also leaving some dedicated time to use for the unexpected events of everyday and as wiggle room to remain flexible. Even in the situations where you don't have the time to keep your casual routine running normally, this will improve your success and happiness, since you are forced to think about what is important enough to preserve and what isn't. Once that works, you are at the point to widen your planning a bit and imagine your ideal week, where possibly every day is different, has a different focus and contributes to reaching your goals as a whole. The concept remains the same, just don't be too perfectionist and try to enjoy the things that work instead of always looking at the ones that don't.
All of this will of course only work, if you have clear and most importantly realistic goals to work with and a clear picture of your future. And even then it won't always, but that's okay. We are all just humans and in even trying to make most of your time you are already far more focused and productive than 90 or possibly 99 percent of the population. Give yourself time to figure out what amount of planning works for your and makes you happy, try new approaches and don't feel limited to what others like me have told you. As always, feel free to share your experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...