by BRIAN HALL
Unnecessary conversations are another source from which lots of time is wasted. These can be difficult things to part with due to the fact that a lot of these conversations can be very enjoyable, especially when they are shared with like-minded people who have interests in mind similar to ours. Having such conversations is not a time waster but instead, a necessity when we have downtime. It is when we have work to do, however, that these conversations more recreational in character should be avoided. We can only afford to have conversations related to work when we are working—any others are simply distractions, no matter who we have them with or even what their contents might be.
Simple daydreaming is another habit that steals much of our precious time out from under us. This habit is so destructive because the line between daydreaming and simply being off task is such a blurred one. So much of our lives are spent transitioning in and out of daydreams and fantasies, that the line between these imaginary realities and our empirical realities becomes hardly discernible—if existent. Psychologist Alfred Adler had a solution to this problem of imagination: fictional finalism. Fictional finalism is the idea that we base our actions as much on our perceptions as on our objective realities. Whenever we make decisions, we are acting in ways determined by both the things around us themselves and our perceptions of those things equally. This means that our perceptions or empirical intuitions, while not constituting the things in themselves, are just as important to our faculty of will as the things in themselves.
Surfing social media is not only a time waster but is also an overall destructive habit to have. The companies that run these social media websites take deliberate actions to profit off of negative emotions such as jealousy and scorn. It is not within the best interests of these companies to make their users feel happy and secure. Instead, they take deliberate measures to keep their users feeling as competitive and as envious as possible, making them take out more and more screen time with the passage of time as a result. Those who are addicted to these media websites are not merely addicted to the positive emotions that these websites may cause but are instead addicted to the whole cycles of emotions caused by these websites, from those that are deeply negative to those that are deeply positive and everything in between. By either cutting back on our usage of these forms of media or getting off of them all together we are not only giving ourselves more time throughout our days, but we are also lessening our risks for developing the anxiety and depressive disorders positively associated with this usage.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Stick to the point during phone calls
Make sure you have a specific place for everything; that way you won’t lose things
Dream on your own time; not during productive hours
Things to try out:
Express your courtesy to others by keeping calls short; respect their time and your own
If you do happen to lose something, leave it for later unless it is something crucial
Set up a time for reflection; this time can be used to visualize your dreams and aspirations
Chapter Twenty-Two: Common Mistakes
The most common mistake that people have in terms of managing their time is a failure to prioritize what they are doing. This weighing of all the tasks that we have on our plates might seem like a useless battle since all of the tasks that we assign to ourselves are usually rather important. Here, we should refer ourselves back to the Eisenhower matrix—it is the most important and most urgent things that we should focus on first. After these, we can move on to the important and not urgent things, followed by the urgent and unimportant, and lastly moving into the unimportant and not urgent—if we even choose to perform these tasks, in the first place.
This prioritizing is also useful in its ability to keep us focused. When we just randomly skip from one task to the next, we often have to keep the more arduous tasks on our minds for longer than need be, which, in turn, distracts us from all of the tasks that we complete before these bigger ones.
Starting our days late is another habit to be avoided. It is always surprising just how much doing so will affect our productivity throughout the day. When we start our days off later than we anticipate, we put ourselves in to compensation mode and subsequently make mistakes that we would have never made otherwise. When we are working extra hard against the grain of time throughout the day, we end up more flustered in the long run than we should necessarily be. Doing this also forces us to reschedule all of the tasks that we have throughout the day, taking away valuable time and energy and leading us to use our work timeless efficiently.
We all have our own periods throughout the day in which we can work our best. For some of us, this period is the early morning when we first open our eyes. For others, afternoon and twilight are when we can do our best work. We have to determine when it is that we work best in order to play to our own advantage. If we are appropriating our hardest tasks to the afternoon hours, for example, when we work our best in the morning, we are not likely to do as well and should, therefore, consider working with ourselves to find a better arrangement of work.
Excuse making and procrastination go hand and hand. This is due to the fact that a “procrastination” is, in effect, just an excuse; an explanation that we make to ourselves as to why we are not getting out work done, which usually entails the concession that we will complete the task at hand at a later point in time. Very few habits can have such detrimental impacts on our productivity levels and our concentration as the tendency to hop around from one task to the next, with no clear force guiding us to the main ones that we have assigned ourselves and are putting off for the time being.
Managing distractions well is another must. Most never really take heed of this necessity, but it asserts itself time and time again no matter how careless we want to be. When we come into contact with things that do not point us toward our goals, it is up to the self to redirect to an appropriate course of action.
We should also avoid undervaluing the time that it takes to complete the tasks we have at hand. Many of us, especially of the haughtier caliber, tend to overestimate our own abilities and subsequently fall short of our own expectations. It is always better here to shoot below rather than above our targets, not in terms of difficulty of the tasks, but in terms of the time spans that we allot to them. In doing so, we are decreasing the likelihood that we will leave things unfinished and increasing the potential time that we might get to ourselves after completing said tasks. What more, it is always preferable to spend extra time on a task and make sure that it is properly done than to make haste and many mistakes in its wake.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Plan work around your most productive times
Manage your distractions by removing yourself from them whenever possible
Value time for what it is: your most valuable asset
Things to try out:
Pay attention to the times of day when you can get the most done; these are the times when you ought to drill down and get stuff done
Identifying your biggest distractors; then get away from them as much as possible
Assign a monetary value to your time; this will help you to quantify what your time is actually worth
Chapter Twenty-Three: The power of flexibility
All things temporal are transient and subject to sudden change. We exist within a specific time and within a system of constant adaptation, which requires us to remain ready for anything to happen at any time and to cut our path through the difficulties that life has to offer as they come to us. One reality that causes lots of this randomness and needs for evolution is the fact that we live in a nearly constant interplay with those around us, always negotiating with them in a perpetual dialogue that makes the benefits of communal living possible. There are also changes that happen as a result of other entities. These are usually chores such as changing car tires, buying grocer
ies that were not expected, and fixing household items.
This flexibility is not only required in our personal lives—its domain extends even to our workplaces. Employees who can work in a more flexible manner than others are often the most valued all those within the workplace. Our positions do become more multifarious when we are able to manage our time in an adaptable fashion. We become able to handle a number of tasks that others would never be able to, and consequently, seem to find more productivity time within the day. This flexibility not only makes us more valuable to others who we may work or live with, but it also helps ourselves out in the way of dealing with unforeseen challenges in personal life.
The variability of our actions (or better, the execution of that variability) depends on both the ability of our will to remain variable and the acceptance of our will of this variability. It is seldom that we are not truly able to remain variable, but we often neglect to accept the variability that comes with living. Certain a priori criteria will always need to be met when trying to convince ourselves to do something, and this remains the case when the action is unexpected and seemingly random, though we tend to act more on impulse when objectives present themselves spontaneously. Among these criteria is the (real or imaginary) ability of the object to benefit us, and the just proportion of time spent on the task and the value of the task itself, whatever that proportion may be.
It is not within the nature of most flexible employees to also be more hardworking or to have more time on their hands, instead, these employees are simply better able to modify their approaches to certain tasks. By means of this modification, we become infinite actors, with the infinite series of our tasks converging to a limiting value. In other words, we take control of the number of tasks we can complete because we are showing a willingness to complete some of the tasks. It is only by this initial willingness to complete our lot that we become able to negotiate with ourselves and others as to how much work we are going to do. We are inviting ourselves to the table and putting whatever chips we want to have in our own hands.
There are unique demands entailed within every situation that we find ourselves in. These demands could be divided in relation to our experiences with similar demands. There are the demands the likes of which we have previous knowledge of, and then there are those the likes of which we have none of. The former we go into more prepared and are therefore usually better able to meet. Meeting the conditions of the latter is always a much more difficult process, involving learning processes that we are not always familiar with. In addition, we could also divide up these demands into those that are expected and those that are unexpected. Having rigidness consists of sticking only to those that we see coming on the horizon while having flexibility consists of inculcating the perpetual flow of the unexpected within our workflow.
Flexibility is also helpful on an interpersonal level because it allows the lives of others to happen naturally. That is to say that a flexible person will always be more understanding when another experiences a change, such as a move, a breakup, or the death of a loved one. He or she will also typically be more willing to lend a helping hand in such scenarios as compared to average people.
Adaption is a phenomenon that occurs on a spectrum. In the natural sciences, one of the most important debates surrounding evolution is the issue of punctuated equilibrium as opposed to gradualism. Of these two competing theories, punctuated equilibrium asserts that there are long spans of evolutionary inactivity or equilibrium on the records and that these long periods of stasis are “punctuated” by brief periods of rapid change. The theory of gradualism, on the other hand, asserts that evolutionary change develops over time with each succeeding generation, leading slowly and steadily to greater changes over time.
These two contrasting theories could be applied in practice to our flexibility at work. There are often long periods of prosaic inactivity in our lives when we are simply doing the same quotidian things day in and day out, then these periods are usually punctuated by shorter periods of great change. There are also certain gradualist tendencies within our actions, as we are usually making small adaptations here and there every day to keep ourselves afloat, so to speak. If we keep these phenomena in mind when deciding on what to act upon and what not to, we will start to map the trajectory of our own lives better.
Flexibility makes us so much more useful as people. This trait is one of those which we are bound to develop over time whether we like it or not. As in control as we want to feel at the time, there are always going to be situations presenting themselves that we simply cannot govern. We, as one early Hellenistic philosopher said, are like a dog being pulled by a cart named fate. This dog can either try to resist the cart, hurting and injuring himself in the process or simply go along with its direction and try to enjoy doing so no matter what happens.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Things can change in a hurry and unexpectedly
Being flexible begins with your mindset
Adaptability is a skill which can be learned just like any other
Things to try out:
Be prepared for change by developing your own contingency plans
Instead of thinking about problems and issues, think about possibilities that could arise from change
Resolve to develop your adaptability skills by stepping out of your comfort zone whenever possible
Chapter Twenty-Four: Building a Perfect Time Management Plan
While flexibility is an important trait to maintain throughout life, this flexibility should only be used as backup material for us to curtail the negative effects of being thrown out of the directions of our plans. Without these time management plans established, our entire workflow is formless and only allows for little flexibility—thus giving us no inherent structure and leaving us to wander and subsequently get less done.
First of all, there is the technique known as “time blocking”. This might be the most common means of organizing one’s time. The advantage of this technique, which consists of writing down time allotments made for specific tasks beforehand, is that it keeps us focused on the events prioritized rather than those that are not, while its main drawback lies within the rigidity of its structure which does not allow for unexpected vicissitudes.
When we set aside official time to perform tasks, we will always pay much more attention to what we are doing, and we also become much less likely to procrastinate or not get our work done in the long run. One of the most important aspects of successful time blocking is the ability to block time according to our proclivities, performing more difficult tasks in periods of time in which we are more productive and less difficult ones when we have less energy. In this way, we can work to our own advantage much more effectively than most ever give themselves the opportunity to do. Typically, this entails completing our most challenging tasks in the morning and our more mechanical ones in the afternoon. Most people are much more mentally agile in the mornings and go on to need to focus on more basic tasks to get themselves over the slump of the afternoon.
Mondays should be designated to lower difficulty tasks, such as planning and organizing. Doing so helps us get the chill of the weekend out of our bones moving into the bulk of the week. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the most productive days of the week for many. On these days we should complete the most difficult and important tasks that we have on our plates. Thursdays are about the time of the week when our energies start to ebb and should, therefore, be spent on easier tasks. Finally, Fridays are our most low-energy days. These should usually be spent planning for the long term and building relationships. We can close out our weeks on a better note when we are relaxed on Fridays, never having too much work incomplete at the close of our work week. Open-ended work is another great thing to spend time on throughout this day.
Another great time management tool consists in one simple question:
If I was being called out of town tonight, what is the one thing th
at I need to get done before leaving?
This question will help you put your priorities into perspective by allowing to identify the single-most important task which you need to get done now. Whatever that task happens to be, you will be poised to get it done straight away.
In a way, working with a sense of urgency is a great way of helping your buckle down and get stuff done. Otherwise, you may end up devoting too much time to tasks which are not conducive to achieving your overall goals.
Finally, it is important to keep in mind that time is just another tool which we can use to manage our lives. If we use it properly, we can expect to be successful at achieving what we aim to accomplish. But, if we let it run our lives, or worse yet, we whittle it away, then it will be hard to imagine accomplishing meaningful tasks. So, don’t be afraid to go about your day with a sense of urgency; it will help you focus on what truly matters.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Time blocking is one of the most effective techniques you can put into practice
Don’t be afraid to change things up if the situation warrants it
We tend to place greater attention on unproductive tasks rather than on productive ones
Things to try out:
Assign specific amounts of time to the completion of individual tasks
Always think about the most important task you need to get done now
Go about your day with a sense of urgency; this will allow you to focus on what truly matters
Chapter Twenty-Five: Five best time management hacks
We have saved the best for last. Since you have been a dedicated reader and made it all the way to the end of the book, your reward are the five best time management hacks known to humankind.
