You’ve probably heard a lot about time management, but if you think about it, unless you’re a Time Lord, you can’t really manage time. Time just happens; your experience of it may speed up and slow down, but you can’t say “I’d like to take two hours from Sunday and add them to Monday, please.” You can, however, manage tasks.
A task is anything you have decided to do, from studying for an exam to buying flowers for your mother. If you just leave it swimming around in your head, you may forget it, or, at the other extreme, you might spend all your time stressing about it. The solution is to write down every task, big or little. It doesn’t matter if your tasks are on your phone or a piece of paper, just so long as you are carrying them around in your pocket, not in your head.
Not all tasks are the same, so you can’t manage them all in the same way. If you just throw everything into a big to-do list, you won’t be managing your tasks; your tasks will be managing you. The best way to classify tasks is into events, to-dos, and habits, and for these you need a calendar, a to-do list, and a habit tracker.
Events
An event has a specific date and time. It could be a one-off event, like a meeting with your tutor, or a recurring event, like a lesson. In either case, the best place for it is your calendar. It doesn’t matter if you use an online calendar like Outlook or a physical diary, but it’s good to be consistent. If you like pen and paper, keep your to-do lists on paper too; if you like apps, make everything digital. The important thing is to get everything down, starting with your timetable (set up your lessons as recurring events). Where possible, import from other services into your calendar; for example, Moodle calendars can be imported into Outlook or Google Calendar.
Most importantly, look at your calendar every morning, and plan the rest of your day around it. You might even want to block in time for different activities. Not everyone wants to look at a full calendar, but the advantage is that you associate your calendar with fixed events; if you’ve pencilled in two hours of study after work on Friday, you’re more likely to do it, and it’s easier to tell other people that you can’t do something because you’re busy.
To-dos
An action that doesn’t repeat and has no set date goes on your to-do list. There are a number of different ways to organise a to-do list, and a variety of tools to help you do it, from a simple piece of paper you carry around with you to complex apps that integrate with your calendar and other productivity software. Again, use whatever suits you.
A flat to-do list is not very useful, and looking at dozens of uncompleted tasks can be stressful! One way to organise your list and make it less intimidating is to give the items tags according to when they need to be done. These don’t have to be precise times; for example, I use the following system (derived loosely from [David Allen’s Getting Things Done method] (https://gettingthingsdone.com):
- Current
- Next
- Soon
- Later
- Someday/Maybe
Of these, the first and last are the most important. “Current” means I’m in the middle of the task or I’m going to do it today or tomorrow. “Someday/Maybe” is for things I think might be cool or useful but don’t plan to do in the foreseeable future -– anything from “Learn data visualisation” to “Visit Japan”. With a system like this, you don’t need to worry about not doing things that you aren’t planning to do soon (or at all), and they don’t distract you from things you need to do in the near future. If you need to start writing an assignment tomorrow, and you also want to visit Japan one day, you want to be thinking essay, not sushi.
There are other ways to organise a to-do list, such as the well-known [Eisenhower Task Matrix] (https://slab.com/blog/eisenhower-matrix/). I’ll look more at different tools for dealing with your to-dos in a future post.
Habits
A habit is anything you do regularly without thinking, like scratching your nose or brushing your teeth in the morning, but here we are talking more about things that you want to make into habits, like studying course material or going to the gym. They differ from to-dos in that they (hopefully) occur more than once, and from events, in that they don’t have fixed times. Establishing and maintaining good habits is important and needs to be worked into your general schedule — there is no point in saying you want to get into the habit of running in the mornings if you don’t have any free time before work or lessons.
It is also important to track your habits. Just like you won’t remember everything you need to do if you don’t have some kind of to-do list, you won’t keep up a habit unless something is reminding or motivating you. I’ll look at how to set up habits and track them in more detail in a future post, but in the meantime, check out [habitica.com] (https://habitica.com) — this is a web tool and app that turns keeping up good habits (and avoiding bad ones) into a game. It also comes with a to-do list, so if you like it, you can use it for both habits and to-dos.
To sum up …
- You can’t control time, but you can control tasks.
- Write everything down — don’t let it stay in your head!
- Put anything that has a fixed time in your calendar.
- Put other things you need to do into a to-do list, and give it some structure.
- Set time aside for cultivating good habits and track how you stick to them.
About the author
Robin Turner works at Global Banking School as a learning technologist and also produces materials for GlobalU. Before this, he taught English and academic skills for thirty years at Bilkent University in Turkey, where his courses included subjects as diverse as technical writing, social and political philosophy and life-hacking. He has published on topics ranging from cognitive linguistics to gamification.
Academia.edu profile: https://independent.academia.edu/RobinTurner19
