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The key in time management for the novice is to
first create the list - Schedules are really important and they help us
to organize our thoughts as well as our activities. Please don't be
vain and think you will remember everything you have to do, chances are
you won't. That one thing you forgot out of the myriad of things that
had to be done may have been one of the most important. Isn't it funny
how the mind works?
Now that you are going to create your list you must
organize it.
Step one
On that list you will have the important to do's
that must be done, and then the extras if you have time. It is important
to have the ???if I have time??? as a second column. The last thing you want
to do is fail to do something important because you wasted your time on
other things.
Of course there are reasons for wasting time. Maybe
you really didn??™t want to do the important thing in the first place, but
that is a character flaw not an asset and you need to work on that.
I will share examples from my own life, when I
didn??™t feel like cracking down on my studying the excuses came up.
Example number one: I had to walk the dog.
Sure I did, but not at the very minute when I had
just walked him an hour before.
Example number two:
I had to call a friend.
The conversation was not all that important and I
could have waited until after studying or even the following day.
My point here is to illustrate how these extra
things were really excuses to not get the important things done; they
could have waited.
To recap, your list has your important things that
have to be done with a separate column that clearly list the optional.
If one of your problem areas is that there is just
enough hours in a day to get through what must be done, look and see
exactly what is truly optional; not necessary, or could be deferred to
another day.
Step two
List your activities in a chronological order and
include a column for the time requirement involved to facilitate each
task.
For example
Activity Time required
Eat breakfast 7:00 am ??“ 7:20 am (taking into
account the time it takes to prepare it)
As you go down your list for the day other
activities could be to take a shower, go to school, eat lunch, go back
to school, eat supper, go to work, come home, study for an exam, walk
the dog meditate, prepare lunch for following day, and set out clothes
for next day.
A very vital consideration is how long should it
take you to do all these things?
If you decided to allow 30 minutes for a shower,
you need to add on an extra 10 minutes just in case when you had your
shower and you are looking for the brush for your hair, your child did
not hid it on you and then you have to run around the house looking for
it.
The key is not to be so rigid that every second
must be adhered to as if you are running a marathon and you are in the
winning stretch. You must allow for the unexpected. Things can and do go
wrong. Many times situations don??™t go as planned. We must allow
ourselves time for that. By adopting this philosophy you may very well
have time to get to the optional activities on your list and at the very
least, you will be less frustrated and less inclined to blame yourself
for situations that may very well have been out of your control to begin
with.
Step three:
Review your list; is everything there or did you
forget something?
It was an impressive list wasn't it? In the
example list I provided, I see something missing.
How were you getting from one place to another? How
were you getting from home to school to work to home? Did this all
happen in a blink of an eye? Of course not it took time. One of the
biggest reasons people do not get through everything needed to be done
on their list during the course of the day is that they add too many
activities, forgetting that each activity requires extraneous time.
You have to factor in that time. For example it may
take 45 minutes to get from home to school, and an additional 45 minutes
from school to work, etc. You need also to allow time for possible bus
delays, traffic jams etc. Your 45 minute trip should now look more like
an hour just to be on the safe side.
Another good example for time management is the
issue of supper. Will you be ready exactly at the time you planned to
eat or are you going to have to wait on your friend who is constantly
late?
Do you know exactly where you are going, or are you
going to argue for 15 minutes with a group of friends about where the
best place to eat would be. These seemingly mundane issues are in fact
important elements in time management.
A final issue to bring up from my example list of
daily activities is the time required for homework. If you guessed it
should take you 3 hours to write that paper, better guess again. Add an
addition hour or two. Very rarely do we as humans guess the exact time
it should take to do an activity especially something like homework. Of
course if you are conducting a lecture and know that regardless of where
you are at in your speech it must end at a pre designated time then it
will be so. However, most activities in life are not that cut and dry.
Back to your paper, many things can go wrong. For
example: the words would not come, there were too many distractions in
the house like tending to a crying baby, the power went out, you had
computer problems, you didn??™t have the right material in front of you
and had to run back to the library to get what you needed, you thought
you could complete the assignment in three hours and even though there
was no distractions and you were tenacious, you needed to take a
breather, to rejuvenate and finally the assignment itself just could not
be done in three hours.
Being organized and allowing ourselves the time
needed to go through our activities with a relative degree of ease, help
us become more productive and efficient in the end.
?© 2006 Carol Roach
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