Time Management–Making it Work

I’ve talked about maintaining the tools of time management–keeping a calendar, a daily planner, and a to-do list–and the essential habit of daily review. 

What this daily review looks like won’t be the same every day, every week, or for everyone. I’m outlining a typical daily review, in case you don’t already have your own drill, for you to try on, modify, see how it works for you.

You’ve gathered together all of the notes, jottings, to-do list that might need to be entered on your calendar and planner. You’ve already got the assignment deadlines from the syllabuses for your course on your calendar and day planner. Ditto your work hours, partner’s birthday, holidays.

First, you update your tools with additions from class notes, coffee date, etc. Put a check mark beside the to-do-list items that got done.

Schedule items from your to-do list that you want to get done tomorrow. Make sure some fun things are on that list, and scheduled. Gaming? Texting? You’re gonna do it, so put it on the list, do it, check it off–and that is how you are the master of it, instead of it being the master of you.

Then look at tomorrow and the rest of the week.

Most of the time, that’s it. If that is all you do in your review, you will be miles ahead. You will also have armed yourself against a significant source of surprises and procrastination.

Other review nights, yes, you can take a bit more time on an as-needed basis. Many students do a weekly review Friday before going out for the evening, reviewing the past week and sketching out the following week.

A caution–Keep it sustainable. I know students and colleagues who spend more time fine-tuning, revising, polishing, adding charts and graphs and coloured ink that the whole process collapses under its own weight.

A caution–Keep it short. Half an hour or less, maybe an hour tops on the weekly review if there are a lot of projects, work and social events coming together. If any one project starts to take up more of the review time than its fair share, schedule a separate time to review just that project.

If you have any tips you’d like to share, let me know. So far, time management remains the single most mentioned tool among my classes and clients. 

As always, if you have pointers or questions, or would just like to share: [email protected]