Discovering the Secret to Managing Time Perfectly
Managing time well is one thing all of us aim to do. We all have things that we are supposed to do and things we want to do and are often torn apart when it comes to spending quality time on both. I found myself in a mess in second year when I started having tests on almost all working days and was part of a dance team preparing for a competition. I had to spend three hours daily training for the dance competition and manage academics simultaneously. I was a typical college student in terms of academics. I procrastinated a lot and when I did start studying, I would take my own sweet time to understand things. That’s when I began experimenting with different techniques to manage time. Over time, I did decrease my procrastination and learned a lot of things along the way.
I firmly believe that hit and trial is always the best approach to understand what suits one the best. All the people around you would be doing a lot of different things to tackle the same problem, but it is up to you to decide what works for you. What I am going to illustrate is only my line of thought and something else might work for other people out there.
One of the significant things I observed was how many of my friends would easily switch between tasks and still focus on it like magic. It never worked that way for me. Let’s say there were two tests scheduled for the next day. Many people start with one subject and then switch to the other when they are bored with it and then come back to the first one later. I tried this and it didn’t work out. I soon realized that I was incapable of switching activities like this. I understood that I need a decently big chunk of time to finish off things peacefully.
“Computers can only do one task (or process) at a time. But a computer can change tasks very rapidly, and fool slow human beings into thinking it’s doing several things at once.” - The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO
This concept of switching between tasks is very similar to what a computer does! There is no such thing as performing multiple tasks all at once, whether it is with respect to humans or computers. When people refer to multitasking, it is just them switching between tasks (the Computer Science people call it context switch). The computer does this very quickly, giving an illusion of doing many things at the same time. But we humans are very slow at doing this (at least, I am). So, in a case where we try to “switch context” it does take time to get into the groove of things.
A year later, I came across a YouTube video, which explains another concept along similar lines. In this video, Matt D’Avella and Steven Kotler describe how flow is a significant factor in helping you get done with things. He talks about the five flow triggers: risk, novelty, complexity, unpredictability and pattern recognition. The one thing I could relate to the most was pattern recognition. I realized that it was easier for me to start a chapter with which I was fairly familiar rather than starting something completely new. To incorporate this, when I began studying a chapter, I searched for the book, ticked all the target topics and read the introduction a day before I was actually supposed to read the chapter. To be honest, this is only a matter of 10–15 minutes, but it gave me a sense of familiarity with what I would be doing later. This also reduced my procrastination a tad bit as I knew I had a lot to cover.
In third year, I faced a different problem. I did not have a lot of regular tests. I felt I had too much time at hand but wasn’t using it efficiently to do as many things as I had the potential to. I couldn’t figure out the crux of the problem until I shared this problem with a friend. He pointed out an amazing thing that I had failed to realize. It was that work expands to fill the time that was allotted to it. For example, though I could potentially finish a task in (let’s say) 1 hour, I took 2 hours to do it because I had the time. To solve this, I started setting strict time slots for myself- “I will finish studying for so and so test in 1 hour”. This failed miserably in my case. I felt too anxious at the beginning itself. Even before I started with the task, I was under the pressure of finishing it soon. I had to relax this down a bit and instead of saying, “finish X in 1 hour”, I started saying, “you have 1 hour to give to X, do how much ever you can”. This definitely helped me fight the issue I faced in the beginning.
I also came across a video which talks about the exact same thing. It turns out that “work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion” is actually a principle called Parkinson’s law. The video also gives an official name to what I referred to as time slotting before- “Time Boxing.” It is a technique used by extremely successful and busy people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Cal Newport. They plan their time up to an accuracy of 5 minutes and it works out brilliantly for them! No wonder they are so successful!
So that has been my journey of experimenting with different time management techniques over the past two years. All of us are on a road of self-improvement and attempt to perform better every time. The only route to succeed (in my opinion) is to keep experimenting with ourselves and eventually figuring out what works best.
Whatever works best would be your own little secret to managing time perfectly!
Hi there! Thank you so much for giving this blog a read. You can reach out to me via mail (miloni.mittal@gmail.com) for any queries or for a small chit-chat. :)
