Time management

Submitted by chaky on Wed, 08/03/2016 - 07:22

Time is a very important resource.  There are many nice concepts how to manage your time (e.g., Urgent vs. Important).  Here are two key principles that I have found to be enough for my life.  

  1. Prioritize your task and choose what tasks you will engage:  it is important to prioritize which task is most important and yield the highest output.  The Pareto 80/20 rule is a neat paradigm (although the numbers are likely not exact) to understand that only focusing on really important tasks (20%) can yield most of your valuable output (80%).   This rule can be used even in your career and life - choosing carefully what exactly you wanna do that will yield greatest output.  I see some people doing whatever comes in their life but these are not efficient.  Our life is limited.  You need to think carefully what and more importantly, what NOT to put your energy on.  There are many great things out there - the real meaning of prioritizing is to say no to many great things, and say yes to your most important thing.   You will find that your life is more productive, more focused, at the same time, you feel always fresh.
  2. Plan your activities:  it is important to plan what you gonna do today, in a week, in a month, in a year.  In that way, you will likely not gonna mess up doing unimportant things.  You also have a better sense of how far are you from your goal.   I found that having a task manager is nice, like a checklist (in my case google cal and task are suitable for me) - I enjoy checking out stuff that I have done and feel a sense of progress.  But more importantly, these checklists prepare my mind for the day, what should I do and what should I focus.  For my suggestion, a good way to plan your activities is not to be overly aggressive, that is, try not to do too many things a day, it will just stress you out and it scatters your energy.  It also tells you that you are not prioritizing.  Instead, try to do only one or two things a day (the most important one) and do it very well.