Prioritising & time management
Mar. 4th, 2012 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseRecently I’ve been finding that my time management has gone to pot. Mostly because I’m not prioritising all that well outside a work environment. In the workplace there is only one stream of information i.e. the work, and everything else already has allocated timing e.g. lunch. Granted, I picked up the habit of working through lunch last year and also working over but I managed to wean myself off doing the latter reasonably enough towards the end, possibly around the time that I stopped caring about what I was doing. The point being that in the workplace, much like school, the time that you actually give over to work is already marked out for you. You might have leeway as to when you have your cigarette break but when you do it’s still 10 minutes already delimited as your own time.
Unfortunately, with a change in circumstance I’m now at home where the boundaries of any assigned task are well and truly blurred and I’m being faced with the fact that I don’t actually manage my time all that effectively at all. I’ve acknowledged in the past that I have a tendency to push everything else aside when I’m working on a particular project, and have since realised that that isn’t a particularly healthy way to go about things. I may get the job done but that tends to leave me exhausted, underfed and left with any number of other tasks around me that I’ve neglected while in pursuit of my goal. The regular occasions where I’ve been left pulling fresh laundry out of the tumble dryer in the morning attest to this. I also tend to develop piles of paperwork that I periodically move around so as to use furniture or access something they’re piled on. All in all, this is a very disorganised way to go about things. Alarmingly, I did live out of a suitcase for the duration of an Easter term, once up on a time, and managed perfectly well, possibly because I only had the contents of one suitcase to worry about, though oddly enough I did have enough decent clothing for Sunday services for the duration.
Since I’ve previously managed with limited things to attend to, e.g. in the above instance, the cleaner cleaning my room so that it wasn’t something that I had to attend to, the idea of downsizing, initially, looks like it ought to be viable. Except there really isn’t anything to downsize. What I’m having trouble organizing are everyday activities. Or rather, what I’m having trouble with is cramming them into a far too small allotment of time. Part of the problem is an ingrained idea that I ought to be ‘keeping busy’ or doing something of use with my time. This is a throwback to my childhood and the notion that if I wasn’t actively studying I should be doing something else to improve my mind constantly, which essentially boiled down to things like not watching entertaining but non-intellectually stimulating TV. Except, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of non-education television every now and again, or non-educational reading or non-educational conversation. Not everything has to be teaching me something critical and new. Reading Carmilla wasn’t exactly educational but it was interesting because it was one of the earliest vampire stories, playing Sands of Time also wasn’t educational but it was fun, watching Whitechapel isn’t educational either but it’s engaging. Unfortunately, while the idea is there, I do have to keep reminding myself that I am allowed some down-time and that it is perfectly acceptable to just do nothing if I want to. In fact, there are times when I need to stop and do nothing for a while, as evinced by all those occasions, mostly in my early twenties, where I’d overwork myself and end up having to spend three days in bed afterwards to recover. Prostrate with exhaustion: not half as charming or literary romantic as novels would tell you, more like lying in bed incapable of stringing a single thought together and left in this unpleasant fog where language no longer makes any sense. I need to hang on to that memory and remind myself that if I don’t want to end up incapacitated for days on end, I really need to slow down and even stop every now and again. I need to give up the idea that I ought to fill every waking moment with something productive, that every book I pick up or TV program I watch ought to be educating me.
I do a lot of self-study as it is and am constantly looking to my personal development, but, that doesn’t meant that I have to do that every waking moment. I can work on things like NLP or emotional intelligence or basic French or strategic thinking or building muscle tone or expanding my cooking repertoire and a whole host of other things that I do to improve myself, but I don’t have to just do that. I don’t have to feel guilty because I read a novel or watched a film or even daydreamed for a while in between all the rest of it. In fact, this taking a break malarkey is exactly what Classic FM used to bang on about during exam season, and studies have shown that it’s better to take breaks and then go back to what you’re doing so as to maintain your concentration. So from that angle it’s a case of working smarter rather than simply harder.
The strong element of prioritising educational pursuits is also something that I really need to knock on the head because it’s prioritising self-study over self-care. Some things like hoovering the carpet, doing my accounts or washing the dishes are necessary regardless of any measurable value in regards to my self-improvement. These are basic tasks that are geared towards keeping the elements of daily life stable. It may take time out of my day to do the laundry but it needs to be done if I want clean bedsheets or clothing, so it’s just as important as studying a new NLP topic. Cooking a meal might not improve my conversational French but if I want to have the energy and focus to do another Pimsleur lesson in the afternoon I probably ought to eat first. While one set of tasks might not create any improvement they are necessary for maintenance purposes, another set are self-improvement tasks and a final set are necessary to recover energy levels. All three types of task are necessary to create a sensible balance. In that light, the easiest way to work things out, as a starting point at least, would be to assign myself one task from each category each day, so that I set myself a self-improvement goal, a maintenance task and then decide on something else to do for fun. Depending in the duration of the tasks or the tolerance level of self-improvement, maintenance or energy each day I can then add or subtract more activities.
Having structured my time, I do also need to be aware of the possibility of change for any number of reasons. I might get up in the morning and feel awful due to a health fluctuation and need to rest instead, or I might end up going out and finding that that occupies far more time that I’d anticipated. Regardless of the reason, I need to be aware of the possibility of elements changing my plans, and work on not feel guilty if I end up going out for dinner with friends who’ve just called, instead of staying in and reading a chapter of What Colour is Your Parachute? instead. I am currently keeping a personal development diary where I note down what I’ve done each day, and while I do usually have something to jot down about the topics I’ve covered that day, that’s not a strict rule to follow to the detriment of my health, concentration or daily maintenance.
The next issue then is to work out when I’m most productive because that tends to change according to my sleeping pattern. During my MA dissertation I was most productive in the afternoon and evening, mostly because I got up late, slept very late and spent the first few hours that I was awake, doing not much of anything. In my last position, I was most productive in the morning, especially if I got into the office an hour before anybody else, and my afternoons had to be far more flexible because I’d be expecting international phonecalls to disrupt them. At the moment, I’d like to keep to office hours so that I’m available to be contacted but I’ll have to see how I structure my day, because while maintenance tasks like laundry might be something to do in the morning, because I can perform other tasks in between, I know that if I get stuck in to something like organising the kitchen cupboards that would probably take up the entire morning with no room for anything else.
There is also the issue of prioritising. I may have times when I need to put aside the regular schedule I’ve set up and concentrate on something specific to be completed by a certain deadline. Which is again something that’s simple enough to do in a work environment when handling only one stream of data. In this case I need to be aware that non-self development tasks can fall into the category of high priority, to be accomplished by a specific deadline, depending on circumstances. So once again that’s coming back to the fact that self-development isn’t in any way the highest priority stream of activity.
Finally then, the last problem I usually encounter is that I don’t give myself nearly enough time to complete something, but rather, allot myself an amount of time that I think ‘should’ be viable, without taking into account any real restrictions. I have a tendency to think that I should be doing more or working more effectively, even if I’m operating at maximum capacity, hence the burn-outs not so many years ago. I push myself harder than is realistically sensible because I nearly always feel that I should be doing more. In all actuality, the feedback that I’ve often received is that I work quickly, often outstripping the competition. So within that framework I really don’t need to be pushing myself harder to complete tasks at a faster pace than the one that I’m comfortable with. In fact, despite what I feel is a sensible amount of time, it might even be worth slowing down a little so as to take care not to exhaust myself without even realising.
Overall, my time-management strategy can be broken down as follows:
Unfortunately, with a change in circumstance I’m now at home where the boundaries of any assigned task are well and truly blurred and I’m being faced with the fact that I don’t actually manage my time all that effectively at all. I’ve acknowledged in the past that I have a tendency to push everything else aside when I’m working on a particular project, and have since realised that that isn’t a particularly healthy way to go about things. I may get the job done but that tends to leave me exhausted, underfed and left with any number of other tasks around me that I’ve neglected while in pursuit of my goal. The regular occasions where I’ve been left pulling fresh laundry out of the tumble dryer in the morning attest to this. I also tend to develop piles of paperwork that I periodically move around so as to use furniture or access something they’re piled on. All in all, this is a very disorganised way to go about things. Alarmingly, I did live out of a suitcase for the duration of an Easter term, once up on a time, and managed perfectly well, possibly because I only had the contents of one suitcase to worry about, though oddly enough I did have enough decent clothing for Sunday services for the duration.
Since I’ve previously managed with limited things to attend to, e.g. in the above instance, the cleaner cleaning my room so that it wasn’t something that I had to attend to, the idea of downsizing, initially, looks like it ought to be viable. Except there really isn’t anything to downsize. What I’m having trouble organizing are everyday activities. Or rather, what I’m having trouble with is cramming them into a far too small allotment of time. Part of the problem is an ingrained idea that I ought to be ‘keeping busy’ or doing something of use with my time. This is a throwback to my childhood and the notion that if I wasn’t actively studying I should be doing something else to improve my mind constantly, which essentially boiled down to things like not watching entertaining but non-intellectually stimulating TV. Except, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of non-education television every now and again, or non-educational reading or non-educational conversation. Not everything has to be teaching me something critical and new. Reading Carmilla wasn’t exactly educational but it was interesting because it was one of the earliest vampire stories, playing Sands of Time also wasn’t educational but it was fun, watching Whitechapel isn’t educational either but it’s engaging. Unfortunately, while the idea is there, I do have to keep reminding myself that I am allowed some down-time and that it is perfectly acceptable to just do nothing if I want to. In fact, there are times when I need to stop and do nothing for a while, as evinced by all those occasions, mostly in my early twenties, where I’d overwork myself and end up having to spend three days in bed afterwards to recover. Prostrate with exhaustion: not half as charming or literary romantic as novels would tell you, more like lying in bed incapable of stringing a single thought together and left in this unpleasant fog where language no longer makes any sense. I need to hang on to that memory and remind myself that if I don’t want to end up incapacitated for days on end, I really need to slow down and even stop every now and again. I need to give up the idea that I ought to fill every waking moment with something productive, that every book I pick up or TV program I watch ought to be educating me.
I do a lot of self-study as it is and am constantly looking to my personal development, but, that doesn’t meant that I have to do that every waking moment. I can work on things like NLP or emotional intelligence or basic French or strategic thinking or building muscle tone or expanding my cooking repertoire and a whole host of other things that I do to improve myself, but I don’t have to just do that. I don’t have to feel guilty because I read a novel or watched a film or even daydreamed for a while in between all the rest of it. In fact, this taking a break malarkey is exactly what Classic FM used to bang on about during exam season, and studies have shown that it’s better to take breaks and then go back to what you’re doing so as to maintain your concentration. So from that angle it’s a case of working smarter rather than simply harder.
The strong element of prioritising educational pursuits is also something that I really need to knock on the head because it’s prioritising self-study over self-care. Some things like hoovering the carpet, doing my accounts or washing the dishes are necessary regardless of any measurable value in regards to my self-improvement. These are basic tasks that are geared towards keeping the elements of daily life stable. It may take time out of my day to do the laundry but it needs to be done if I want clean bedsheets or clothing, so it’s just as important as studying a new NLP topic. Cooking a meal might not improve my conversational French but if I want to have the energy and focus to do another Pimsleur lesson in the afternoon I probably ought to eat first. While one set of tasks might not create any improvement they are necessary for maintenance purposes, another set are self-improvement tasks and a final set are necessary to recover energy levels. All three types of task are necessary to create a sensible balance. In that light, the easiest way to work things out, as a starting point at least, would be to assign myself one task from each category each day, so that I set myself a self-improvement goal, a maintenance task and then decide on something else to do for fun. Depending in the duration of the tasks or the tolerance level of self-improvement, maintenance or energy each day I can then add or subtract more activities.
Having structured my time, I do also need to be aware of the possibility of change for any number of reasons. I might get up in the morning and feel awful due to a health fluctuation and need to rest instead, or I might end up going out and finding that that occupies far more time that I’d anticipated. Regardless of the reason, I need to be aware of the possibility of elements changing my plans, and work on not feel guilty if I end up going out for dinner with friends who’ve just called, instead of staying in and reading a chapter of What Colour is Your Parachute? instead. I am currently keeping a personal development diary where I note down what I’ve done each day, and while I do usually have something to jot down about the topics I’ve covered that day, that’s not a strict rule to follow to the detriment of my health, concentration or daily maintenance.
The next issue then is to work out when I’m most productive because that tends to change according to my sleeping pattern. During my MA dissertation I was most productive in the afternoon and evening, mostly because I got up late, slept very late and spent the first few hours that I was awake, doing not much of anything. In my last position, I was most productive in the morning, especially if I got into the office an hour before anybody else, and my afternoons had to be far more flexible because I’d be expecting international phonecalls to disrupt them. At the moment, I’d like to keep to office hours so that I’m available to be contacted but I’ll have to see how I structure my day, because while maintenance tasks like laundry might be something to do in the morning, because I can perform other tasks in between, I know that if I get stuck in to something like organising the kitchen cupboards that would probably take up the entire morning with no room for anything else.
There is also the issue of prioritising. I may have times when I need to put aside the regular schedule I’ve set up and concentrate on something specific to be completed by a certain deadline. Which is again something that’s simple enough to do in a work environment when handling only one stream of data. In this case I need to be aware that non-self development tasks can fall into the category of high priority, to be accomplished by a specific deadline, depending on circumstances. So once again that’s coming back to the fact that self-development isn’t in any way the highest priority stream of activity.
Finally then, the last problem I usually encounter is that I don’t give myself nearly enough time to complete something, but rather, allot myself an amount of time that I think ‘should’ be viable, without taking into account any real restrictions. I have a tendency to think that I should be doing more or working more effectively, even if I’m operating at maximum capacity, hence the burn-outs not so many years ago. I push myself harder than is realistically sensible because I nearly always feel that I should be doing more. In all actuality, the feedback that I’ve often received is that I work quickly, often outstripping the competition. So within that framework I really don’t need to be pushing myself harder to complete tasks at a faster pace than the one that I’m comfortable with. In fact, despite what I feel is a sensible amount of time, it might even be worth slowing down a little so as to take care not to exhaust myself without even realising.
Overall, my time-management strategy can be broken down as follows:
- categorising activity: self-development, maintenance or relaxation
- planning set activities per unit of time e.g. one of each category per day
- monitoring each category so that certain standards are maintained e.g. dry laundry gets put away promptly
- giving myself a realistic timeframe for completing an activity e.g. factoring in breaks
- being aware that priorities can change and being adaptable as necessary e.g. spending a day on one type of activity due to a deadline
