Ah, the new year. This is the time when everything gets a facelift and your juices are rejuvenated. You’re starting afresh: Work. School. Relationships. New tasks. Old tasks. But everything has its own pressing schedule and priority.
The new year is the time for organizing. According to Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh, “Organizing is what you do before you do something so that when you do it, it’s not all mixed up.” Sounds simple enough, so what’s the big deal?
As you dust off your goals and set up your deadlines, time enters the “Twilight Zone” and begins to shrink and compress. It is said, though I personally doubt it, that everyone has the same amount of time: 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and 60 minutes an hour. Yet suddenly you feel as if you’re hurtling toward a black hole. Everything is making its demands on your ever-diminishing time, taking more time than is available.
The pressure is on. Your time has become more precious than Beanie Babies. Smacking you in the face is the harsh reality that if you are to achieve your work and personal goals, you’re going to have either alter the space-time continuum as we know it or become more adept at structuring the time you have.
Structuring means using available resources well. It means producing the desired outcome. It means becoming both effective and efficient. The good news is that time management can be learned. The bad news is that most don’t learn it in their youth and have to struggle with habituating to it in their “less-malleable” adult years. Fortunately the process is pretty straightforward. It involves first determining what you believe needs to be done today. This is your daily “To Do” list.
To do this you make a list of the tasks demanding to be done then rank them: What needs to be done first? Second? What can wait? What can be done by someone else? What can be eliminated because it really doesn’t need to be done?
Once you have the tasks in mind, you have to map out your strategy on paper. The paper part is important. Trying to hold it all in your head allows you to play avoidance games. You “misremember” what needs to be done and when or “inadvertently” forget it altogether.
Your plan will determine what you’re going to do and when. This requires that you assess how much time each item will likely take. Maybe it takes an hour standing in front of the television ironing your clothes but how much to do a report for school or work?
Your “To Do” list should contain no more than 8-10 items which are prioritized by both their level of difficulty and disagreeability. Always do the hardest first. This a psychological ploy to get it out of the way immediately so you can’t waste your time and energy anticipating and dreading it. Furthermore, you won’t procrastinate, looking for ways to keep from doing it, once it’s out of the way.
Also you need to build rewards into your list, large and small things you enjoy doing, and give yourself a treat after you complete a task. The larger or harder the task, the larger the reward.
Another part of time management is ridding yourself of time wasters and interrupters. It’s easy to procrastinate. As C. Northcote Parkinson notes in his book Parkinson’s Law, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
If you give yourself a day to finish the task, that’s how long it will take. If you allow people to visit or call, if you listen to the radio or watch TV, these interrupters significantly cut down your efficiency.
But the single biggest obstacle to managing your time is perfectionism. Everyone has a standard of perfection lurking in the inner recesses of her/his brain—in your imagination. It’s an unrealistic standard of excellence you believe you “should” achieve. But you can’t achieve it.So you need to determine what will do the job satisfactorily and be “good enough” and do it. It’s important to remember, however, “good enough” doesn’t have to mean mediocrity, only realistic achievement.