For the past weeks, I have been thinking about time and how I can manage my time better. It’s a hard thing to do (I’m not yet happy with the way I do it), but I’m trying to get better at it. This post is my attempt to share what I learned (that works for me) so that it might help somebody out there. This post is also a reminder to myself to try to prioritize stuff better and stick to what I decide to do.
The Sad Truth
The sad truth is that time is limited; I don’t like to accept it most of the time, but it’s true. There are lots of fun activities that I would like to have unlimited time to do. Naming a couple of sad experiences with time:
- I enter a library and see all the books, my initial thought is that I want to read all of them. BUT TIME IS LIMITED :(
- I read a research paper, and I really like it. I think to myself I want to read all of the papers about that research topic. BUT TIME IS LIMITED :(
- I look at my bookmark list of all the fun blog posts that I want to read. I would love to read all of them. BUT TIME IS LIMITED :(
Master of K
Let’s accept that time is limited unless somebody finds a way to make humans immortal in the near future. The next problem is how to spend time.
You have a finite amount of time available to you, and you want to spend it on the things that you like to do. You can do either of the following:
- Spend most of your time on a single activity.
- Spend it on a handful of activities.
- Spend it on a lot of different things.
I think the main trade-off each of us has to make is to choose which of the previous ways of spending time we want to choose. If you allocate time to a lot of activities, you will have little time for each of them. If you allocate time to a single activity, you will not experience much of the other activities in life.
It’s a personal choice and there is no right or wrong choice. It really depends on how you are happy to live your life. Do whatever makes you happy and don’t compare yourself with another person who chose to follow a different path.
Perfectionism Lies to You
I would like to add a note here about the lies a perfectionist mind tells you. Perfectionism tells you that you should do everything and try to be the best at all of them. But this is not true as we saw that time is limited. The irony is that if you listen to this illusion, you will end up far away from what a perfectionist mind wants. If you spend time on a lot of things, you will not be great at any of them: the complete opposite of what your perfectionist mind wants.
Prioritizing
So if you choose to spend time on a handful of activities, the hard part is still left: how to prioritize and resist the temptation of spending time on a lot of different things. The other hard part for me is to remind myself that time is limited, and I can’t be great at a lot of things.
I don’t know yet how to do this in a way that works for me, but I have some initial ideas on how to solve it.
The BackLog
I think having a place where you put all of the things you want to do is useful. It is a place where you can see all of the things you want to do and decide which one of them is necessary to do in the current day/week/month/year.
The main benefit of having a backlog is that you can write whatever comes to your mind there without taking immediate action. You prevent yourself from spending time on the things that might not be necessary by just writing them in the backlog and deciding whether you want to do them or not with a view of all the things that you want to do and thinking about your priorities.
It is still not always clear what you want to spend time on, but at least you can think about it instead of relying on your intuition. What I found is that my intuition is not really good at deciding what to do. If something is interesting, my feelings direct me to do it without ever thinking about whether doing it is necessary or not. At least by writing these down, I try to be more aware of my choices and think deliberately about them.
Don’t Always Stick to The Plan
I think one major drawback of planning what you want to do with a backlog is that you might become too strict with it. There should be room for exploring new areas since not always you even know what you want to do. We learn from new experiences and can decide better on what we want to do in our lives. I believe it is really important to have a way of adding new activities to your backlog or whatever you use to manage it.
Summary
- Time is limited
- Decide about how you want to spend it
- Use whatever approach works for you to spend time the way you want