HOW DO YOU SPEND YOUR TIME ?
If I waste a minute, I waste an hour; if I waste an hour, I waste a day; if I waste a day, I waste a lifetime !
Solzhenitsyn, The Cancer Ward
One of the major factors controlling how close you are to being the person you would like to be is your skill in managing your time. If you can control how you spend your time, you can control your life. In order to put your time management skills into practice, you need an overall view of how you spend your time. Don’t be misled; just because you happen to have had a few fruitful evenings lately, you may believe it is always that way. Likewise, if you’ve encountered a few snags in getting things done recently, don’t be discouraged into thinking that it will always be that way. Looking at the whole picture will help you see how close you come to spending your time in the way you would like.
THE WHOLE PICTURE
The following exercise will help you see the whole picture by categorizing your time and illustrating that how you actually spend your time may differ from how you want to spend it.
MONITORING YOUR TIME USE
How you spend your time says a lot about what is important to you, just as how you spend your money says a great deal. If you wanted to know if you were spending your money in
EXERCISE
TIME USE CATEGORIES
This exercise will help you develop categories to use in identifying how you spend your time. Examples of these are –
- Work
- Household maintenance
- Relaxing
- Miscellaneous
- Play
- Recreation
- Friends
In the space below, list some categories that fit your lifestyle :
1. ____________________________
2. ____________________________
3. ____________________________
4. ____________________________
5. ____________________________
6. ____________________________
7. ____________________________
8. ____________________________
9. ____________________________
10.____________________________
Using as many time categories as you need, divide the first circle on the next page into wedges reflecting how you currently use your time. Do the same with the second circle, reflecting how you would like to use your time.
a manner consistent with your priorities, you would probably prepare a budget and keep track of expenses. Do the same with your time. Like a money budget, this may not be something you want to do all of the time, but it is a good exercise to go through at least once a year.
Why do you need a formal system ? Because people are not very good observers of their own behavior. In fact, they tend to be quite unreliable ! One of the best examples of this is a classic experiment in which a psychologist asked a group of people who wanted to lose weight to write down everything they had eaten during the previous two days. They were then fed only those foods for the next two days, and they all lost weight ! They had not remembered everything they had eaten.
To become a more systematic observer of your own behavior, you need to develop a record-keeping system. This is one of the preliminary steps in bringing about change, and it is called “gathering baseline data.” It is important for two reasons. First, from this information you will determine if you are spending your time the way you want. Second, after you have made more effective and efficient use of your time, you will be able to assess your improvement. For example, Alice, a graduate nursing student, was feeling guilty about not spending more time with her family. She felt that she was constantly pulled between her family and her work. When she analyzed her time, she was amazed to discover how much time she spent talking to her friends. Alice decided to tell her friends that since she would be preoccupied with her family and school work, she would have little time for socializing until the end of the summer when she would complete the requirements for her degree. She was then able to reorganize her commitments to be consistent with her priorities. Without knowing precisely what was taking up her time – without collecting baseline data – she would not have been able to do this.
To begin, keep track of how you use your time for one typical week that reflects both weekday and weekend routines. Be careful not to take your data during an atypical week – for example when you have out-of-town guests, are involved in an unusual project, or have to work overtime.
There are two systems described on the following pages that you could use to collect the information : the 24-hour schedule (my system of shared, private, work, and project time); and Learning International’s “Managing Time and Territory Program.” Try either method, or use a combination of the two. Only by charting an accurate record of your time will you be able to see if you are spending it in a manner consistent with your priorities. (Read through sections 1 and 2 below, choose which you want to use, and then record your time use in Exercise # 10.) |
