Thoughts on Time Management
Some times it feels like good time management can solve everything in our lives, if only we had time for it. It is possible learn this mystic art with a few conscious steps.
Time management is one of the trickiest to do well. Personally being an efficiency maniac - i enjoy optimising every single minute of my day, and evaluating it to see if I could have used it better. Once you start doing this, you have time for *everything* - its just a matter of balance and trade offs.
For those looking to analyse their time more, I would recommend the following:
Daily Task Journal
A daily task journal to track what you are up to. I personally use Evernote for this. I would recommend:
Starting your day by writing down all the tasks you want to focus on for the day, it sets your days agenda, and allows you to focus on delivery.
If a higher priority task comes into the queue, consider swapping it with something you were originally planning to focus on.
Normally you would be focusing on two to three things - ideally you don’t want a long list of never ending tasks, it becomes demotivating. Set a realistic target and finish all the tasks in it before the end of the day.
You cant improve which you do not measure.
Spending time on your tasks is fine, but we are doing soo many other things during the day, including getting distracting things like social media and Youtube etc. You can use different tools to track apps on your laptop/phone, your physical activities, calendar for meetings and other tools for things like sleep. The ones I use are below:
RescueTime or similar on all your devices (mobile + laptop) to see how to spend your time on them.
Mi Band or similar to track your fitness and (more importantly) sleep, how long are you sleeping and how well you are sleeping. Are you spending enough time being active, or just sitting all day?
Google Calendar for tracking meetings, and high level blockers like visit to the doctors, community events etc.
Once you have a sense of where your time is going - you can then start optimising it. For optimisation, the rule is very simple, you are looking to remove the distractions as much as possible, and then reduce things which are not important by either delegating them or automating them.
Sleep is more important than you think
"The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life." - Extreme Ownership by Jocko
Sleep takes about 30% of the time in our life, and has the largest impact on productivity during the day. This is the single best optimization you can do to your life. Everyone is different and some people are better at getting away with sleep than others, but everyone does eventually need to rest to ensure best output.
I have already talked about measuring sleep. I would also recommend understanding it more. Get a feel for what works for you, helps you start fresh in the morning and helps you stay focused during the day. For _most_ people having a regular pattern (i.e. fixed time for going to sleep and waking up) has a an overall positive effect on your sleep cycles.
One common “issue” with waking up I have seen is an un-optimised sleep cycle (i.e. waking up during deep sleep cycle). Study them to get a better understanding of how this can work better for you.
Multi-tasking does work for specific cases.
While this is not something you should be looking to do all the time, there are specific combinations where this is useful. Things where you are doing some repetitive work, which doesn’t require your full focus - like some low intensity exercise, commuting etc are ideal times to spend listening to audio books, podcasts or even spend some time in deep thought. Once you actively start looking for opportunities you will find such options within your daily activities.
#goldenrule
Don't try to make everything time efficient - some things like spending time on your family and religion are not designed to be optimised.
#timemanagement is probably one of the most important things to do in our lives - but very few people actually do it. My fav bit from this is that we have 168 hours per week, and even if we sleep for 8 hours every day, and work 50 hours per week - we are left with 62 hours every week to do other things. How do you spend these 62 hours every week?
Some nice insights in this podcast episode - including planning on Friday for next week helps reduce anxious Mondays, how to use exercise during the day as a reset button and most importantly why creating a habit doesn’t have to mean doing it everyday (3 days a week is a good target).
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3Rlbi1wZXJjZW50LWhhcHBpZXI/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL1RaX25zdlVjdFNYS1ZabVM4QVR3R3B5Z2FGZnR3QWFISHI4d1hQeTVCVUU?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiohry_h72AAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQLA