Being organised is an efficiency matter. It means you have more time. Time management is about understanding how much time you have, and what you are going to do with it. So time management comes first.
What is time?
Time is both quantitative and qualitative. It's really important to understand this, because you need to manage both how much time you have, and what the best times to do things are. Money is a subset of time. For us working stiffs, we have a hard limit on how much money we will ever get based on how much time we have to work in, and a soft limit based on how much time we use to make money.
There are several elements to managing your time. You need to understand when your time exists, what your priorities are, and how long things take to do.
Priorities
Before you even look at your own priorities, you need to understand your involuntary time requirements and your duties to others that cannot be minimised.
Involuntary time is time taken to eat, use the bath room, sleep, travel and all those other things you can't avoid. Sometimes you can try to minimise these things, but it's not a good idea because they will just come back with reinforcements and end up claiming more of your time.
Duties are those things you are relied on for by other people which, if you do not perform them, will lead to their harm. To differentiate, responsibilities are things you take on; duties are things thrust upon you. Responsibilities can turn into duties (when you become the only person capable of doing something), so watch out!
Because duties and involuntary time are the things you control least, they have to be accounted for first. Everything else fits in around them.
Now is a good time to write down a list of your involuntary times and duties. Hopefully there aren't too many of them!
Importance and Urgency
Once you understand what your involuntary time and duties are, you can start to think about all the other things you do. There are two ways to think about priorities in relation to time: their urgency and their importance. These both must be factored in when considering any priority. The key thing to remember is that while importance is subjective (you get to choose what's important) urgency is far more objective (it is a function of how long it takes plus how soon it needs to be done. The closer the time it takes gets to how much time is left to do it, the more urgent it becomes).
Everything you do needs to be evaluated for its importance and urgency. Only then can you adequately allot time to things. If you don't get this balance right, you will just end up stressed all the time. If you think of importance and urgency as a punnet square, you want to live your life in the important non-urgent square. All the other squares are less ideal: important urgent is what we are using time management to prevent, but is sometimes necessary; non-important urgent is a trap that should be avoided; and non-important non-urgent is stuff you can do to just waste time for no real benefit, so is great for procrastination.
| Important | Non-Important |
| Urgent | 2 | 4 |
| Non-Urgent | 1 | 3 |
Importance
Working out importance is absolutely vital to time management. Urgency is pretty much empirical: but importance is something you need to understand for yourself. Think about your spirituality, your family, your friendships, your study, your free time, and your work time. How would you rate them in terms of importance from first to last? This is vital to knowing not just how much time to give these things, but what kind of time to give them. Listing these broad high level titles of the things that claim your time gives you something to refer back to, to remind you of what's most important to you. It can be important to have something like this when non-important urgent things rear their head, because often it is easy for something urgent to look important when actually it's not.
The order of importance at the highest level is not about excluding things. It is about including everything in your life to make sure that it gets the time, both quantitative and qualitative, that it deserves. Sometimes there might be something in our lives that takes up a lot of time, even though it's not the most important thing (eg work). This makes it all the more important to ensure that we have enough quality time to spend doing the things that are even more important to us.
Now is a good time to list the things that broadly take up your time in order of their importance. This is just high level titles: religion, work, study, leisure, relationships etc. Remember that you decide where things go in this list, and there is no wrong answer. We've already taken care of involuntary time and duties, after all. Draw this list up from left to right next to your involuntary time and duties: these are titles after all, and this way we can put stuff under them. Once you've got them all down, you can move them around to put them in an order that you're happy with. You can always change it, but it is worth thinking about what order these big headings go in, because it helps shape your attitude towards those things.
The most important things need to be given the best time to do them. Thankfully the best time to do some things isn't the same for other things. Identifying when the best time is to do something isn't usually that difficult. Some things can only be done at certain times, which is the de facto best time to do them. Others are just best done at certain times, and can give you more wiggle room in when they're done.
Once you have a list of high level titles of what takes up your time, then you can start filling in underneath them all the things that take up your time under those titles. There will be lots of them. They don't need to be in any particular order, just write down whatever comes to mind. Think through your days, weeks and months and about what you do. Put everything down, under whatever heading it best fits with. It is very helpful to break down your big time titles into individual activities, because you can then give them a more individual importance ranking, but also breaking things down into their component parts makes it easier to manage the time they take up and makes them easier to accomplish. So list them in order of their importance to you.
Best Times
Once you have all those individual activities listed down, we're going to make another list next to them. (If you prefer lists to be long rather than wide - like I do - then now is the time to take all your lists and paste them underneath each other, so you can use less columns overall.) This is a list of the best times (qualitatively) to do all of these things. It doesn't need to be a specific time period, just morning, afternoon, evening (or a specific day, or even "work hours" if that's the only time it can be done).
Adding the best qualitative times for these activities is important, because this is where your time management starts to really take form. One of the best ways of remembering when you need to do things and structuring your time is to give each activity and even high level title it's own specific part of a day, week or month (depending on its repetitiveness). Creating a logical structure that makes sense to you is the best way to ensure that the things important to you get done.
Free Time
It is at this point that you may start to realise you don't have as much time as you'd like. That's totally normal. The people who need time management most are the people who are highly committed to lots of different pursuits. While it's great to do your best to fit things in, one of the reasons we list things in order of importance is to see which of the things we do may have to be sacrificed, or given so little time so infrequently that they become more of a wish than an actual activity. Time is precious, and sometimes you have to be firm and make hard decisions not to do things you'd like to do, because there are other things more important that you would like to do more.
Urgency
That list gives us a good idea of levels of importance of the things that take up our time, and the kind of time we should give them. Now we need to determine the amount of time these things should be given. This is done by determining their urgency. Remember urgency is a function of two things: when something needs to be done by, and how long it will take to do.
Hard Deadlines
Determining when things must be done by is usually a mix of hard deadlines (when something objectively must be done by in order to retain its value in being done) and soft deadlines (when it would best suit you to do it). Hard deadlines are fairly easy to determine because they are usually set in stone for a reason external to you. While it's important to know these hard deadlines because they place suitable limits on planning, they are not great on their own. Simply planning to do something just before it is due is a great way to fail to do it because an unforeseen circumstance appears and blows out the expected time it would take. More complex activities are actually impossible to do simply with hard deadlines! For this reason it is much better (not to mention more efficient) to plan using your own soft deadlines. These allow you to complete an activity during the time that best suits you, before it becomes too urgent.
Now it's a good time to look at all the activities on your list and determine their hard deadlines. Always do that first: a soft deadline can never be after a hard deadline. What you should now have is your activities, when the best times are to do them, and their hard deadlines. Looking at their best times to do them should tell you when you should set your soft deadlines for each activity (assuming there is still enough of those best times left to do the activity!). Of course, the definition of a best time is partly determined by what time you have left. And this brings us to working out how much time something takes to do.
Many activities repeat regularly, and so their deadline appears over and over. That's fine - you can just list it as "Wednesday 9pm (weekly)" or "10pm (daily)" or "30 May 11:59pm".
Estimation
Everything you do takes time. Although it is all measurable, we don't often take the time to do detailed time and motion studies of our lives. So what we're left with is estimating how long something is going to take. Sometimes that's easy and sometimes it's hard, and some people are better at it than others. Short of actually measuring how long something takes to do on average, the best way to estimate how long it will take is to sit down and give it some proper, considered, honest thought. Rushing estimation is great way to rob yourself of time to do something. The less capable you are of estimating how long something will take, the more generous you should be in giving it time. Finishing something faster than you planned is always better than running out of time.
The bigger an activity is, the harder it is to estimate how long it is going to take. Big essays and assignments are a classic for this. This is why it is such a good idea to break down big activities into several smaller activities, as it is often easier to estimate how long it is going to take to do all your research/reading, all your planning, and all your actual writing. Even then, working out a total amount of time can be difficult. Do your best, and be as generous as you think you need to be, especially with more important activities.
Now is the time to fill in the estimated time you think it will take to complete each activity. This can take a while. But it's worth doing, because it will really help you to protect the time that these things take, and gives you a target to aim for in terms of time to set aside for its completion. Some things take a long time, and can't be done in one sitting. That's fine, put the total amount of time for now if you can.
Soft Deadlines
Now that we have all this information, we can get to the meat of time management: setting soft deadlines for all these activities. Soft deadlines are where it's at in time management. In a perfect world, everything would be done to a soft deadline, because soft deadlines are made up of the time that is best to do an activity. With all the information we now have, we can see already the best time to do things in, we can see when it's due (hard deadline), we can see how long it's going to take to complete, and so it's just a matter of dividing the estimated time of completion between the number of best times we have for that activity between now and its due date.
Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and the simple fact is that the best time to do a lot of things is similar - things that take mental effort, for instance, are best done at whenever you have your peak performance in the day. But lots of things compete for your peak performance. That's why we have ranked things in order of importance. But even then, you will find your peak performance hours are at a premium, and will fill up quickly. This is why procrastination is a real killer - it's doing things that aren't important or urgent, but in your peak performance times!
So now you need to work out the next best solutions for the activities that don't get to have their best times. When doing that, you have to realise that doing things outside of their best times makes them take longer. So make sure you give them enough extra time.
When that's done, you are pretty much at the end of your time management. The next thing to do would be to feed in your hard deadlines into a Google calendar with alarms set to remind you at various points that things are due, and start to fill in your time slots with the things you are meant to be doing. Then you have an easy reference to tell you when you should be doing things.
EMERGENCIES
Emergencies happen, and like involuntary time and duties, they are unavoidable. But unlike them, they are also unplannable. The best thing about having a calendar that tells you exactly what you should be doing and when is that when a real emergency comes up (hospital visit etc) you can actually see what time you lost, and you will know what you need to make up. It allows you to reschedule things and shuffle stuff around with a real idea in mind of how much time you are going to need.
Being Organised
Organisation is really just a method of ensuring that you have more time to do the things you want to do. Here are a few quick things that help you to be organised.
Time management: by planning out your time, you actually end up being more efficient. Yay!
Doubling up: If you can work out how to do two things at the same time (eg memorizing in the shower) then you can make much better use of your time. There are some times that seem dead, like travel times. Try and fill them with things that you can do in those times (listen to lectures, building your relationships, free time reading).
Using money wisely: Money can sometimes be liquid time. Sometimes you can use it to free up time for things that are more valuable than the money you use to gain it (takeaway food is a great example).
Learn to say no: There is an old saying, "If you want something done, give it to a busy person". This is true, but it also makes busy people dead people. So you have to learn to say no sometimes. The best way to do this is by having a strong understanding of your priorities of importance.
Alarms: Having alarms is just so great. They remind you to do things. If you find one alarm isn't enough, set two, or three, or ten. I have three alarms to get up in the morning. If an alarm goes off and you don't need it, what's the harm?
Structure and repetition: Putting things where they belong, and doing things at the same time regularly, makes you less likely to forget them. You don't forget that MoG is on a Tuesday, or that church is on a Sunday, or that pants go on your legs. It's the same principle.
Distractions: Try and keep distractions to a minimum. They are like little urgent non-important things trying to grab your attention.
