I am definitely going to take a course on time management… just as soon as I can work it into my schedule.
-Louis E. Boone
Last week I was in Finland. It has been awhile since my last visit and actually I didn’t even plan to go there. Unfortunately/luckily there were few major force majeure cases and I was forced to show my face in Tampere. Well since I was there I could also do a lot of good stuff besides my unpleasant duties. Without even planning too much, I already had stuff to do for a full month. Of course I couldn’t do them all and that’s why in the airplane from Delhi-London I decided to use a very simple Time Management tool shown below.
DO IT: These things are urgent and important. So it’s a no-brainer that these will be the tops of your priority list.
DELAY IT: These aren’t important, but someone thinks they are in a hurry. Try to delay them and often you can completely skip them or finish them when you aren’t in a hurry.
DATE IT: You need to do these, but not today. Still in order to do them, one might want to date them. I use ToDo –lists and my Mac’s iCal application for this. Planning time for them is like they would already be done.
DUMB IT: These are useless. The faster we learn to say NO, the better we are. Someone else might think that they are important, but you can be a healthy egoist. Like we all know, if you say always YES to these, one day you might have to say NO to something truly vital.
Trust me I have seen a few Time Management tools – some good and some not so good. As a concept Time Management is a fraud. Time can’t be managed and we all have 24h to spend every day. But things like clock and calendar can be very useful as long as they are servants and not masters. I often use the one above because it’s simple and fast. I think many Time Management tools are too complicated for us incomplete humans. Complicated systems aren’t very user friendly.
In Finland I got everything done and a lot more that I didn’t plan. One amazing thing was to spend one afternoon meeting roughly 10 people while enjoying sports. We did with old and new friends the Finnish Military Fitness Test. Combining tasks is one time management classic and doing sport with friends has to be one of my dearest combos.
