“In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.” – Malcolm X
Week Thirty Seven
Here you will elaborate on your ideal personal time management system. Discover what elements ‘your system for managing yourself through time’ must have. If after answering the following, you are still stuck for ideas, you can find alternatives by checking out the ways other people support, schedule, and provide prompts for themselves though time.
1) What support will you use to plan and schedule your tasks and downtime each day? (you can use anything from alarms to calendars to notes to apps)
2) What can you do to chunk tasks to make them more manageable? In other words, what can you do to break tasks down into their smallest elements so that they are possible to address in distinct time units.
3) How can all the things you have on your ‘to do’ or ‘goals’ list be integrated into this system? Your time usage is influenced by your priorities so make sure only things you are really committed to make it onto your schedule.
4) How does your system deal with interruptions? People dropping by or telephoning or making unsolicited requests interferes with your productivity or down time. What can you do to minimize disturbance to the flow of the task you have undertaken and keep yourself on schedule? How could you handle the needs of your friends and family and also get your stuff done? When could you establish times of availability and non-availability to interruption?
5) How will you keep organized? In other words, how does managing your possessions, documents, and electronic records support you in managing yourself through time? Your time usage is also influenced by your environment, so how can you arrange it so it allows you to make the best use of your time?
6) Take a look at a recent week with your old system for allocating time. Identify any unproductive time. How does your new system reduce the risk of these unproductive instances?
7) How does your new system make your time enjoyable and fun?
This exercise benefits you by giving you options for setting up a new system if you don’t have one in place or tweaking what you already have to make it more effective. Taking time to figure out how we use time is a great way to streamline our commitments and arrange things so that we make it serve us better.