Week 3 - Time Management

 This week, after talking about big picture concepts like strengths and purposes, we came down to a critical everyday concept that keeps the wheels rolling: time management.

To start off, Viji ma'am, pointed out that the name 'time management' is inherently flawed. We are not focused on managing time; time is a universal concept beyond each one of us. What we really aspire to have more control over, is the way we utilize our limited energy over the time we have.

This resonated strongly with me. I have never felt the 24 hours I have each day to be a limitation. The bottleneck to maximizing my potential is always how I use the time when I am high on energy and motivation.

Even in the book Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests that most people in the workforce can really spend only around 4 hours a day after meetings and whatnot, doing meaningful work. Our performance does not improve much (if not drop) when this time is stretched. Rather, it is closely tied to using this time to its fullest with focus.

To effectively make changes to our habits and schedules, we first need to fully understand our current habits. For this, we did a 'Time Audit' - estimating how we use our time in a typical day, how efficient we feel this is and what can be improved.

My time audit was a reaffirming reminder of what I knew. Fortunately, social media (1 hour) isn't a major problem for me. However miscellaneous phone usage was high (3 hours) and could easily be cut down and virtually removed entirely. I was spending more than sufficient time on academics (5-6 hours), which made me realize that my corresponding output lacked not because of a lack of time, but rather because the time I spent was too distracted.

On the lines of my second concern, Viji ma'am mentioned that we must identify at what time(s) of the day we are highly productive, and makes sure we treat these periods as sacred undistracted work sessions.

Moving on, we discussed beating procrastination and estimating time requirements. For the former, Viji ma'am suggested that we read the book Eat The Frog.

For the latter, Viji introduced us to Parkinson's Law: work expands so as to fill up the time for completion. In order to avoid this, we must have a reasonable idea about the time a task actually requires. To do this more effectively, Viji suggested that we try and break our tasks into small, easily visualizable sub tasks and gauge the time requirements for those,  then working our way up.