Time Management Cure

by BRIAN HALL

  When we lack a firm grasp on our priorities, we almost lack a firm grasp on life itself. Since we do not know where we stand as far as what we need to get done is concerned, we also lack the knowledge of where we are going in our life and are thus doomed to be gusted about by the harsh winds of vicissitude until we finally start to prioritize our time more effectively. And without knowing the sequence with which we need to finish our tasks, we are still rational actors but are rational actors acting with randomness and drift. It is much preferable to know the order in which we need to get things done so that we can manipulate tasks to lead into one another, their payouts all building on top of one another in predictable manners over time.

  Before we go to bed each night, we should ask ourselves the following questions: What are tomorrow’s top priorities? How much time will it take to complete each one? In what order should these be completed? Taking these measures will allow us to get much better sleep and also to have a much better concept of what we are doing heading into the next day.

  Finally, learning to block our time always seems to give us much more of it. When we do so, we are dividing up our time within a day into predetermined slots, which do not allow us to venture too far from what it is that we need to accomplish. To establish these slots, and to obey them once they are established, is to keep ourselves much more focused on the tasks at hand each and every day.

  Action plan for this chapter

  Things to keep in mind:

  A positive mindset is a great way to set up success

  Proper sleep and nutrition are key elements for increased productivity

  Planning the day ahead during the night before opens the door to success

  Things to try out:

  Focus on the good that you can do for others

  Be strict in your bedtime and your diet; don’t comprise on your health

  Cut out 15 minutes of your evening routine to plan your tasks for the day ahead

  Chapter Nineteen: Habits Effective of Time Management

  We live the most distracted lives that have ever existed. Constantly saturated with information and sometimes useless media, we often fail to stick to one task at a time and see its completion. If we follow the crowd in the way of how we spend our time, then we are doomed to become just as short-sided as all of the rest—but if we instead instill a few good habits into our daily routines, we will live much more natural and hence easier lives as a result.

  In order to meet our goals, we should first define them. This includes identifying what it is that we want to achieve in life. Here, we should make both practical judgments (concerning what these goals should be) and theoretical judgments (concerning what these goals are). While we are the sole determiners of the personal goals that we have for ourselves, we often fail to set the goals that would truly benefit us the most. In other words, sometimes the goals that we have for ourselves are not beneficial, and when this is the case we should look at the sources of these faulty goals, the causal relationship between them and others related to them throughout time (in order to ascertain fixed action pattern without our own psychologies that might be working against us), and finding the teleological significance of these aspirations (or their end purposes).

  We are much more likely to achieve the goals concerning those things that we are most passionate about. This is a likelihood that should be kept in mind as we think deeply about the goals that we set for ourselves. When we do not care about the things that we are doing, our work suffers as a result—and as our work suffers, our well-being suffers with it, further damaging our work. This self-enforcing causal loop can cause us to lose our talents and also diminishes our reserves of willpower and potency.

  Idleness should be avoided at all costs. While this may be obvious to most, what is not always obvious is how to avoid this state of unworthy complacency. Often this inaction is a result of either apathy or excuse making. Whenever we feel this state of idleness asserting itself in our actions and thoughts we should remind ourselves that if we do not do what we need to do in order to sustain ourselves then we are going to pay heavy prices and that no excuses that we have are going to get us to better places than we are at currently.

  Here, we can remind ourselves of Aesop’s fable: The ant and the grasshopper. The grasshopper in this story spends his whole summer in idleness, playing music, while the ant is busy working all throughout these hotter months. When the cold of winter comes to the two, the grasshopper is not prepared and dies as a result, while the ant is doing just fine because he has all the supplies that he needs. The moral of the story is that whether we like it or not, work always catches up with us. When we waste too much time doing nothing all we are assuring to ourselves is that we are going to have to work extra hard in the future. Some degree of idleness is necessary in order to live a healthy life, but this mode of being is always subordinate to those which will sustain us in the long run.

  Fighting procrastination is a feat similar to fighting idleness, as the two negative patterns of habit are closely related to one another. Both of these traits stem from the same, sometimes justifiable, want to avoid labor. The main difference is found in the execution of tasks, though—idleness does not imply that tasks are ever even started on, while procrastination implies that they are merely put off until times later than ideal.

  In order to avoid excess procrastination, we should focus solely on the tasks in front of us. In shifting from one area of focus to another frequently, we are only making our thinking short-sided. There are two main types of distractions that we face when working: the ones we deem to have significance and the ones we admit have none. While the former may be more beneficial to focus on than the latter, it still remains a category that should be subordinated to our main projects. The latter should never be focused on, though we sometimes like to do useless things for their own sake, much to our detriment.

  These tasks that we start on before all others should be the most difficult ones on our roster. If we put these ones off until the end of the day, we become much less likely to complete them and typically do much worse work on them even when they are completed. These tasks naturally make us more apprehensive than others, which is exactly why they should be completed before others, to get their weight off our back if for no other reason.

  Similarly, we should prioritize more boring tasks over the more exciting. Doing so will give us lights at the ends of the more dismal tunnels that we are forced to walk through. When we have an exciting task following a prosaic one, we have a reward by the law of contrast. What more, when we skip straight into the tasks that we enjoy more we are more likely to simply keep completing like tasks, often neglecting the ones that we do not find immediately appealing. Here, our preference for instant gratification asserts itself—just as it does in other places.

  The average office worker is interrupted every three minutes at work. Worse yet, once we are interrupted, it takes on average around 23 minutes to regain our focus entirely. Interruptions are rarely detrimental in terms of the importance of their contents but are always so in terms of their frequency. We can try our hardest to focus after having been disrupted, but a better strategy employs curtailing the interruptions at their sources. When we have certain things that more commonly interrupt us than others, we should look into how to mitigate their impacts. It is only the uncommon disruptions that we should simply walk away from with the aim of regaining overall focus.

  Multitasking should also be avoided, as it does to the brain things very similar to those that interruptions do. Working on multiple things at once only allows us to skim the surfaces of all the subjects covered, while never giving us the opportunity to focus greatly on anything. It takes our brains time to build focus, and it is only with our undivided attention that this focus can be found. Multitasking allows us to neither spend much time on what we are doing nor to focus the whole of our attention to one task at a time.

  Deadlines are a must in the way of preventing procrastination. Without th
ese limitations placed on the time slots that we appropriate to certain tasks, we are almost certain to go beyond the time necessary to finish these tasks. With this aimless use of our time, we cannot discern when we should start and end long term projects because we have not considered how long they should take. And if we do discern this length of time and put it down as a deadline, we should always try to respect these deadlines.

  Action plan for this chapter

  Things to keep in mind:

  Live in the present as this is the best way to beat procrastination and idleness

  Set clear goals especially about those things which you are most passionate about

  Make sure to be clear on the amount of time projects and tasks ought to take you

  Things to try out:

  Always ask yourself, “what can I do now to help me reach my goals”

  Make a list of the things you are most passionate about; these ought to become your main priorities

  When you set out to do a task, add a deadline to it; act as is you boss was breathing down your neck in order to get it done

  Chapter Twenty: Time management hacks

  Most of us, whether we realize it or not, are in desperate need of a time audit. The term “time audit” is here used to refer to the process of deliberating and systematically analyzing how one’s time is used. These audits take into account how our time is actually used rather than how we perceive it to be used. We often overestimate just how effectively we are using our time, usually neglecting to account for the more useless and hedonistic by routes that we often waste much of our time on. We should start this process out for just a week, to begin with, with a projection made beforehand of how we assume our time is going to be spent. This projection should then be contrasted at the end of the week with how our time was in fact spent, according to the measures we took of it. We will usually see that we spend much more of our time in idleness than we initially project ourselves to.

  We should always be planning ahead in life. This usually entails determining our desired results of situations that we find ourselves in before heading into them. With these determinations made we give ourselves standards by which all results can be measured. If results do not meet our expectations, we can ask ourselves what went wrong and determine in what ways we can meet our goals in the future—if our expectations are met, or even exceeded, all the better. Here, we can also avoid wasting too much time on deliberating results, since we already have a set of a priori criteria in mind that determine clearly and concisely whether or not the situation at hand was a useful or beneficial one.

  Again, we need to put time limits on the tasks that we complete. Without these limits imposed we are always likely to spend far more time than necessary on the tasks that we take up for ourselves. It is far better to complete a task in more time with a limit than to complete the same in less time with none. Whether we are scheduling appropriate time slots for our tasks is a whole different issue altogether, what is most important is that we are divvying up our time in a systematic manner.

  Sundays should always be used, in part, to plan the upcoming weeks. Here, we should establish our goals for the week ahead, and take into account what we will need to do to achieve said goals. These week-long goals should then have the efforts by which they can be met divided into daily goals. Making this division will help to curtail procrastination in our actions because we will have smaller, more easily digestible chunks of action as opposed to large, daunting tasks. Our energy fluctuates throughout the week. For this reason, we should assign for ourselves our lower-priority tasks for our less intensive day (Mondays for example) and our higher-priority tasks for those days in which we have more energy (perhaps Fridays).

  Our daily plans should be in line with our weekly courses of action. When devoting just 10-15 minutes a day to making these plans, we find that we are almost magically granted more hours in our days. When we arrange all of our normal tasks into their respective time slots and respect these time slots thereafter, we become much less likely to waste our time and therefore get much more done.

  We have to remember to reward ourselves for all of our hard work, not just some of it. When we receive the “random” tasks that the days throw at us, we should reward ourselves for completing these as much as we do for completing the premeditated ones. Here, we should write these tasks down, allowing us to recognize ourselves at the end of the days for completing them. The concept of accomplishment as its own reward is a problematic one. Most of us are not ok with completing tasks for their own sake, especially when they are tasks that we do not particularly enjoy completing. For this reason, we should supplement ourselves with additional rewards for all that we do, not just the premeditated actions.

  It is when we first wake up that we can focus the most, as may surprise many. We are much less hindered by distractions and worries throughout these first few hours of the day. This is why we should complete our most important and demanding tasks within this time frame. Here, we will have more energy to appropriate to those tasks and will be able to get them out of our ways so that we can go through with the rest of the day with their enormous weights off of our shoulders.

  Channeling our focus to block out distractions can be done on many different planes. The first of these is our sense perception: we should look to block out any disrupting noises and or images that may be getting in our way of achieving our goals. Next, we should analyze our upper cognition: often it is the people in our lives who distract us the most, and this happens largely subconsciously. We should try to remove all those who we find distracting from our headspace while working, and the same principle applies to any of the distracting situations we may find ourselves in. Without this channeling, we are bound to be working mentally on many other things besides what we are working on physically. This will never allow us to do our best work.

  Lastly, perfectionism and the tendency to get hung up on small details are two of the greatest adversaries of productivity. Very few things that we do are going to be anywhere near perfect in their completion. We tend to hold ourselves to these irrational and often harmful standards in life, not trusting our own intuition as we go along. Not only does it waste our time to try in vain to live up to these imaginary standards, but it also makes us feel dissatisfied with ourselves as people. In striving for perfection and being pedantic, we are lessening our ability to work effectively and not being fair to ourselves.

  Action plan for this chapter

  Things to keep in mind:

  Conducting a time audit will reveal how your time is spent

  Align your daily plans with your weekly plans; this will give your individual days purpose and meaning

  Getting caught in the minutiae of planning takes away from actually getting things done

  Things to try out:

  Schedule time audits every few weeks; that way you can keep track of your time management skills

  Your weekly plans ought to be overarching goals that are broken down into daily ones

  Avoid trying to make perfect plans; there are no such things

  Chapter Twenty-One: Avoiding Time Killers

  We have so few hours in each day that we get, and the hours that we do plan out for ourselves are often wasted largely on things that we do not need to do and that do not benefit us in any real ways. These time wasters may seem like good things to do while we go through them, but they poison the clocks of all those who do not curtail them.

  Using these time-wasting activities are only started on to appease our capricious desires. These are usually things that we are reminded of inadvertently and do not need to be looked into. Looking into these activities is a destructive habit because this time that is invested in these things is almost never monitored and is subsequently compounded over time without us realizing it—thus making us sacrifice large spans of time when accumulated over the months and especially over the years.

  One of the biggest time wasters for modern people is the lengthy phone call.
These are often made to people who we hardly know and or do not truly want to talk to. The average active modern person makes phone calls most days of their lives, and often these phone calls are to people and institutions that we have no real interest in and are simply compelled to call out of temporary necessity. If these phone calls can ever be replaced with shorter text messages and or emails, their material should instead be rendered through these mediums.

  Sometimes, our wasted time is given to our sorting through disorganized clumps of material and or information. We should take the time preemptively to avoid these types of clutter and any others that make it harder for us to find things. Throwing out the things that we do not need will clear up both physical and head space for us, allowing us to better sort through the contents of our possessions. Thereafter, once we have sorted through the contents of our hordes, we should continue to organize them, keeping them tidy and placed only in their predesignated areas.

  Searching for misplaced items is another related area of concern on this topic. When we are constantly losing things, it scatters our brains. Searching location to location, even mentally, makes our thinking short sided and exposes us to more uncertainty than need be. We should, however, stop this problem at its source if we want to avoid these states of mind. Permanently keeping things in their proper locations will eliminate our need to search out for them later, and will, in turn, give us much more time to focus on what we enjoy and what benefits us.

  When we finish a task early, we should create more work for ourselves to start on during the extra time that we have found. This more direct approach to our work schedule will help us to complete more projects with our time, and in turn, make much more money. With this seamless starting off our new tasks, we will avoid wasting our time on things that do not give us any great benefits.