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How do you manage your time?


bilis_money

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I wake up real early.

 

Then I go to work, where I spend my days pretending to write PHP code (well, I do actually get some things done), and posting on these forums.

 

Then I get home, eat dinner, and usually go to school. If I don't have school I either go over my girlfriend's (if she's not working), or sit around playing City of Heroes.

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I have a hard time with this. I work from home and attend school, and so MWF I'm at school in the morning and then TR, I'm at school in the evening, so it's hard to keep a steady schedule. You just have to be aware of what you're doing. I found wearing a WATCH helped me a ton because now if I spend too much time goofing off I realize it and say to myself okay, you have a paper due tomorrow and it's 10pm, GO WRITE IT ;)

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Well seeing as how everybody's day to day activities are different, I don't think you are really going to find any solid one-size-fits-all "model." Time management is the same as working toward any other goal: write it down, allot a timeframe for it, and do it.  Make a list of all of the things you need to do during the day, decide which order it should all go in based on any number of things, allot x amount of time for each thing, and follow the schedule.  Don't keep doing the activity if you run out of the alloted time; move on to the next thing. Period.  If that's not possible, then learn to do it faster, or adjust your schedule to a more reasonable time next time.  Because if you don't, then there's not point to the whole time management schedule thing.  Making it is not the hard part.  Sticking to it is. 

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You need to categorize everything you do as a priority or a non-priority.

 

My priorities, in no particular order:

spouse, family, hobbies, work, some aspects of school

 

My non-priorities:

everything else

 

Now you need to determine where you want to spend all your time; for most people this is a no-brainer.  I like to spend as much time as possible engaged in priorities, which means anything else I do I try to do in minimal time.  I'm an extremely efficient person; I constantly analyze my procedures for accomplishing tasks and try to find ways to cut down the number of steps or total amount of time required.  I live by a very simple rule:  Don't spend any more time than is necessary to complete a non-priority task.

 

As an example, given two equally difficult school assignments for equally difficult classes, one in computer science and the other in history, I would always spend more time on the computer science assignment.  Computer science is my priority, history is not; I do not factor my GPA into this at all.  If I know that I have approximately 10 hours total to work on both of them and I can spend 2 hours on the history assignment and guarantee at least a B, then that's all I'll spend on it.  That leaves me 8 hours to spend on my priority (or less if I feel that I'll receive an A after only 6 hours of work).

 

You also need to learn how to multi-task.  Everyone has a certain amount of dead time during the day when they're not really doing anything.  Time spent driving, waiting in traffic, taking a bath / shower, at the gym, sitting on the toilet can be put to good use.  I almost always read while sitting on the toilet or taking a bath.  If you have a regular 1 hour commute to and from work, that's 2 hours you can spend thinking about what argument you want to make in a paper or how you want to solve a particular programming problem.  Same thing with the gym if you're on the treadmill or elliptical.

 

Another important skill is evaluating how long you have to work on something.  If you're looking to kill 30 minutes before you start working on homework, don't engage yourself in an activity that is likely to go over 30 minutes.

 

I also find it helps to spend a good amount of time doing nothing.  A lot of times I think people might set out to do something that would only take them 30 minutes but really takes an hour because they're tired and their mind is consequently distracted.  Taking a 20 minute nap and then completing the task in 30 minutes saves 10 minutes overall.

 

The most important thing to remember though, is that we're all gonna die at some point, so don't sweat the little things.  They're really not that important.

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