Managing time is an important skill you need to be successful in school and in every aspect of your life.  When you are good at organizing your time, you get more things done and enjoy the satisfaction of doing that. But some people don’t manage their time well.

Some problems with time management are similar to problems that can happen with managing things:

• Not having enough time to do all the things you want to do is similar to not having enough space to organize your possessions
• If you don’t arrange your time in systematic ways so you can easily understand and follow your schedule, that’s like hiding stuff under the bed. You don’t know what is there unless you search through a lot of mess.
• If someone directs you do something at a time when you don’t want to do it, that is similar to someone organizing a collection of things in ways that make it hard for you to find and use them.

PREVENTING OR SOLVING PROBLEMS WITH TIME MANAGEMENT

Fortunately, some of the problems with managing time can be solved using the concepts and methods for managing things that you have learned in this book.  We list these here and then explain them in detail in the next chapters.

MAKING  AN INVENTORY OF YOUR TIME EVENTS

A master organizer always asks the WHAT question first because you can’t create useful categories if you don’t know what will go in them.   The same goes for organizing your time.     You can’t manage your time effectively if you haven’t answered the WHAT question — what are the activities or events that you need to plan to do?

Your inventory for time is a list of all the things you have to do (DIRECTED events) or might want to do (PERSONAL events).   After you have created this list, you can analyze the events to design a good schedule for doing them.

THINK LIKE A “TIME ARCHITECT” — ORGANIZE YOUR EVENTS FIRST, THEN SCHEDULE THEM

Remember that an architect designs a building and creates the instructions for the people who construct the building afterwards (the blueprint).   You need to think like a “time architect” in a similar way.    You should analyze the inventory of events carefully so you can schedule them in sensible ways.  Some things have to be done before other things, or have to be done by some deadline.  You shouldn’t just put things in your calendar or schedule where there is empty space.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT SIZE OF “PIECES OF TIME”

A master organizer also knows to ask “how many things is that?” (remember the examples of puzzles, bicycles, and sports teams?) when organizing events.   Some events are always “one thing” —  it doesn’t make sense to break the task of brushing your teeth into two parts.  But If you break up a big task like writing a book report or learning to play a piece of music into smaller parts,  you can more easily fit these smaller tasks into your schedule.

It is also important to choose the right size pieces of time when you design and use your time schedule. Some events in your schedule repeat monthly, so the best way to keep track of them is with a monthly calendar. Other events repeat weekly or daily, and this makes it easier for you to be reminded of them if you recorded them in a weekly or daily planner.