Intro
The day has 24 hours, if you sleep for 8 that leaves us with 16 hours of work and play time. Imagine if you could use 14 hours of that period in order to pursue your goals and doing what needs to be done, sounds perfect, right? Sadly, very few manage that. One of the main reasons why very few are so successful at using their day is proper time management and almost non-existent procrastination. Most of us have only wishes to accomplish something. We all know that for pursuing goals, one needs to take action, to get into it and try to be on top of it. In this brief guide, I’ll try to get to the bottom of the problem and show you the ropes on how to get out of it. This guide is a pure waste of time if you aren’t willing to take action on it so do yourself a favor and close this tab if you aren’t willing to take action.
The Art of Procrastination
Now, as those that aren’t willing to take action are gone, we can get to basics. First and foremost we need to know what’s procrastination and when it occurs.
- Procrastination is the art of delaying a task or group of tasks because:
- Task requires some effort.
- You are lazy.
- You are tired.
- You don’t feel like doing that.
- Insert some excuse here.
Some of you might ask, it’s a negative thing and I’m calling it art, why’s that? That’s because it’s truly an art to find something over and over on YouTube (Facebook, etc.) that doesn’t even seem interesting to you just so could delay the task (or tasks) that need some effort in order to be completed.
Battling procrastination isn’t an easy task. I’m sure everyone procrastinates at least a bit before doing certain task(s) but what separates wolves from the sheep is the amount of time they procrastinate. Now as we know what’s procrastination, lets begin to slowly erase it from our daily routines.
Dealing with Procrastination
Procrastination occurs when you give yourself unspecified tasks, also even more when there’s a bunch of unspecified tasks. What I mean by that is adding tasks such as:
- Clean the house.
- Learn JavaScript.
- Study.
- etc.
All of the above tasks sound so horrifying in my head because nothing is defined what you’ll actually do. Even if your house/flat isn’t that big - cleaning it can be a huge task if you want to cover the whole area. You’d have to vacuum, wash all windows, curtains, rugs, clean the furniture, clean behind those unreachable places and move furniture in order to access them, etc.
Learn programming - wow, so much detail. There are numerous programming languages and you just want to learn it like all of it? One whole language? Two? Even learning one language is a tedious, time consuming process and requires a lot of effort but no you just said you want to learn programming… Absolutely nothing was specified.
Studying - same as above, you didn’t specify anything, you could have 10 subjects waiting for you, what you’re going to do? Surely you won’t study 10 at a time (in most cases).
First step in preventing procrastination is having smaller, well defined tasks so you wouldn’t be afraid what you’ll do and how. Lets face it, you don’t know how you’ll do stuff in a certain task but with some effort, you’ll get the ropes sooner or later.
Second step is being focused on what you do - meaning no distractions, no other thoughts, just focus on what you’re doing. I’ll cover focus in more depth further down the road.
The Art of Time Management
Lets see the pros and cons of good time management. Yes, there are cons as well.
Pros of time management
- You are being more productive - things are getting done.
- No more delays.
- Less stress because everything is according to the plan.
- More confidence as again, things are getting done, you see yourself being more successful with daily tasks.
- Positively affects your career, whether you’re still in school or have a job.
Cons of time management *You’ll have an inner battle with yourself, especially if you’re lazy.
The Basics
Now, how do we manage our time? There are 3 things you need to do in order to manage your time better besides having long term and short term plans. Those things are having a daily task list, exercising often and keeping a journal.
Daily task list - This can be written on a piece of paper or use Excel like I do. I recommend making your own template that suits your needs. For example mine has day, date, tasks and efficiency of each task. I like statistics so there’s always some percentages involved in my planning. Try to be descriptive and precise as possible so we can prevent the procrastination part as I’ve mentioned above. Remember to separate bigger task into smaller chunks!
Exercising often - this is probably the most confusing point for most. What exercising has to do with time management? It doesn’t have much in common. However, it is important to give energy in order to get energy. Let me explain. Remember coming home and just wanting to sit on a couch and idle? That’s what most of us do and that’s the problem. Most of us, again, won’t do much after our “couch” session, most likely you’ll choose a path of least resistance and do that. Your task after that might be to eat (even tho you might not be even hungry). It’s known to man that exercising is good for many things but it’s good to bring back the energy you need. I’m an amateur street-workout guy and training for hours can break me right after I’ve finished with my training but after a few hours, I’m ready to tackle everything once again. I’m not saying you should be running a marathon every other day, no. Try exercising how much you like. That can be for 15 minutes, for 45 minutes, 2 hours, you’re the boss here. It’s only important that you exercise 3 to 5 days a week or even more if you can manage.
Journaling - Here you write how did you day go, your efficiency level, what can be improved, what needs to be carried over to the next day, etc.
You might think that having a daily task list and a journal will take up a lot of time. In practice, it doesn’t take more than 10 minutes a day, trust me on that one.
Importance of life goals
There’s one important thing left - make a long term and short term plans and read it every single day. That’s to keep you reminded of your life goals every single day. Take time to see what are your goals and what you want to accomplish. My advice is to never plan more more than 5 years in time and I think that’s also too far. There are a few types of planning, those for short term and long term.
Short term should be:
- Current day plans - This is the only one that’s required to have for better time management.
- Plans for tomorrow.
- Weekly plans.
- Monthly plans.
- Quarter plans - a.k.a 3 months plans.
Long term should be yearly plans and up to 5 years.
I’m not saying you should have every single thing planned out and carry out all the short and long term planning but having a one or two short term (beside daily plan) and a yearly plan does wonders. Once again, it’s important to read your life goals every single day, that’s why we have planning. That way we can track our progress and when we see some progress, the data of it, we get more confident and continue pursuing that task instead of giving up.
Theory of tasks
Biggest problem in the beginning might be how do you organize your tasks, how to even make plans, etc. Even if you start doing something, that might not be the proper thing you should be doing right now, there are far more important things.
Here is the chart of tasks. Tasks are separated into 4 categories:
- 1.Important and urgent.
- 2.Important and not urgent.
- 3.Urgent but not important
- 4.Not urgent not important.
First category are your daily priorities and must be done as soon as possible. For example you have an important exam or job interview tomorrow so you need to get ready for it but you haven’t even started yet! Usually first category is most frequent if you procrastinate a lot which is really a bad thing. Important and urgent tasks should be situations or events which you cannot predict and pop up of their own.
Second category are tasks that everyone wants to accomplish in their life. Those include but are not limited to wealth, health, great relationship with opposite sex, self-confidence, well-being, etc. For these tasks we think we have enough time for it and the real problem occurs when important and not urgent tasks become urgent. Then you are bound to mess things up. When they become urgent, you have far less chances to succeed in accomplishing it. Lets say, when you’re 20, you don’t care about getting married. When you turn 45, you suddenly care and havoc breaks loose. Maybe a stupid example and is incredibly open for arguments but you get what I mean.
Third category are interruptions in your daily life. They are really hard to control and might seem urgent and important but actually are just urgent, nothing more. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be looked after but hold your horses for a while. For example, you’re in the middle of a mind-boggling task and your phone rings or you get a notification that someone has messaged you on Facebook/email/whatever, what do you do? Most of us see it immediately but try to keep that at a distance, at least until you’ve done with that task. 99% of time, that call/message is nothing urgent but seems like it.
Forth category is self-explanatory.
Making a daily to-do list
Before we start I want to warn you. Don’t make 50 tasks in one day, you’ll scare yourself with the amount of work you’ve put on your shoulders and you’ll procrastinate, trust me. Nothing will be done on that day!!!
It was incredibly important to have that goals list I’ve written about a bit earlier. Looking at your goals, you can make a daily to-do list based on ‘em. Every to do list should have a priority tasks and other, regular tasks. I’ve read somewhere that if you have more than 3 priorities in a day, you actually don’t have any priorities. According to that, make sure you separate real priorities from regular tasks.
Priorities are your non-negotiables during that day. That means, there’s no negotiation with your inner self whether or not you’re going to accomplish those priorities. Those must be done.
Rest of the tasks can or cannot be accomplished and they are subject to factors such as your time management, difficulty of your priorities, distractions, procrastination, etc. Obviously it’s incredibly useful to accomplish those as well. Priorities cannot be subject to the previously listed factors.
This is a solid to-do list of a University student’s day: *Study and cover 30 pages of that practicum for Physics class. *Write new classes for your C# project that solve use of mnemonics in your project. *Clean your desk from the debris you’ve hauled on it. *Arrange a meeting with John.
Daily time management
In order to be more efficient with your time, you’ll have to divide your productive sessions into smaller chunks, meaning doing a task for 6 hours straight is never a good idea. Why dividing your tasks into smaller chunks is recommended? It all comes to down to reducing procrastination, boredom and increasing your focus, especially flow of the focus.
Flow of the focus is most important and that’s the only thing that prevents procrastination from happening. When you’re in the flow, nothing else exists except you and that task. If you reach a high enough stadium of flow, you forget time even exists. During the flow, your concentration is at its maximum and you’re being most productive as a human being can be. In order to be productive, you need to be concentrated on the task. In order to be concentrated on the task, you need to have a higher level of flow. You get it, they are closely connected.
How will you divide your productive sessions is up to you but my advice is 3/4 of time should be productive, 1/4 is reserved for resting. For example, you have a productive session that lasts for 45 minutes and break for 15 minutes. Other examples include hour and a half of productive time, 30 minutes of break. You pursue these sessions as long as you want during the day but I usually have 3-4 of them per day as I do 1.5h/30 mins.
Words of encouragement!
Time management is a skill, a very valuable skill. That being said, every skill requires a certain amount of effort and time in order to get better at it and eventually, master it. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t tick every box on your to-do list, that’s normal. Nobody can be 100% efficient, there will be always some delays, distractions and what not. Our job is to cope with that as best as we can. If you look at managing your time properly from different angle, you’ll see that time management is actually life management. Time is the only resource that cannot be brought back once it’s gone. You cannot save it for later. You gotta use it now, in present, to influence your future. All the time I’ve put into writing this guide cannot be brought back. Hopefully with this short guide, I will influence someone’s future on their journey to success.
Thanks for taking time to read that post.