I taught a lively group of post-grads the other week and the theme of the lecture was ‘time management’. This is of course nonsense, as we can no more ‘manage time’ than we can knit soap.
We can make use of time, we can fritter it away, or we can use it to drink sherry in. But we can’t manage it… what we have to do is manage ourselves.
At the end of the work I offered my top five tips to manage ourselves more productively and here they are again, in all their sparkly glory:
1) Notice when you work best and make sure you’re productive during those hours. For example, I work best towards the end of the day so I make sure I do all my ‘bitty’ admin tasks at the start of the day and big projects at the end, when I’m more settled and can think clearly.
2) Don’t fight your kid. If the excitable little child inside you wants to go and play then let him/her our for some fresh air. Often if we force ourselves to work when we want to play we just fritter the time anyway, or work more slowly. (This is called ‘being rebellious’ and we all do it).
3) Say ‘not at this time’ or ‘not yet’ if you’re asked to do something for someone else and you’re busy. That’s easier than a blank ‘no’, which people can find hard to say.
4) Less is more! Write a short to-do list which you can achieve in the next four hours. Stick to it and then pull something forward from tomorrow, if you have time at the end. That’s more satisfying that always pushing things back, like a snow plough.
5) Write it all down. Keeping things in your head just fills an already crowded space. Have a list of lists if you like. I favour Post-It notes and keep a pile of scribbly actions on my desk. I don’t mind that they’re messy. All I mind is that they’re there! Writing things down saves memory and means we can organise and shuffle and reorder the things we need to do. That’s much harder to achieve when they’re all in our head and as the old adage runs; if you can see it, you can sort it.
Life doesn’t have to be complicated and making effective use of time is built on having a methodical process for organising our day… and the self awareness to know when we’re productive and when we’re fooling ourselves.
What do you need to do differently this week, in order to make better use of your time?
