Worksmart: Pre-Read
Make Time Tangible
In the journey from chaos to order, people often find it easier to organize space than time, because space is something you can actually see. Stacks of papers, piles of clothing, and shelves full of knick knacks are visible. You can pick things up and move them around in your space to see how they fit. You can easily see when your plate (or your closet) is too full.
Time on the other hand, is completely invisible. It’s something you feel and it feels … utterly amorphous. How long is a day? Well, that depends on your energy and how much sleep you had. How long is an hour? Well, if you’re doing something you love, it whizzes by; but if you’re caught up in something dreadful, it crawls painfully along.
How long will a given task take? Well, that depends on how you feel about it. Hate doing the dishes? It must take an hour. Love surfing the net? Easy, it’ll only take ten minutes.
As long as time remains slippery and elusive, you will have difficulty managing your days. To be successful, you need to change your perception of time. You need to learn to see time in more visual, measurable terms.
Think of Your Schedule Like a Closet
In my own journey to getting organized, my biggest breakthrough came when I realized that organizing time really is no different than organizing space. Essentially, just as your closet is a limited space into which you can only fit so many items, a schedule is a limited number of hours into which you can only fit a certain number of tasks. Just as every pair of shoes you place in your closet takes up a certain amount of room, each task takes up a certain amount of time.
Once you learn to see time like you see space, you recognize that there are quantitative limits to the time you have available. Just as your closet has a finite capacity, each week gives us just 168 hours to get things done. When your closet is too full, you must choose to keep one pair of shoes over another. When your schedule is too full, you must choose to keep one task over another. Changing your perception of time facilitates your ability to more effectively plan and prioritize your days.
When you start to see your schedule as a container, you begin to think of your to-dos differently. It’s no longer about whether you like or dislike a certain task, it’s about how long a task will take and the potential return on your investment. As such, it becomes critical that we learn to evaluate our to-dos quantitatively, in terms of their size (duration), rather than qualitatively, in terms of how we feel about them. Think about it: the size of your closet doesn’t change based on how you feel about your wardrobe. So why would the size of your schedule and to-dos? Just as we can tell whether an item will fit into our closet by its size, learning to estimate how long a task will take is the only way to know whether we can fit it into our schedules.
Ultimately, changing your perception of time is the key to good time management because it serves to unlock a series of other essential skills necessary to become the master of your own schedule. It is a pivotal, time-saving mindset shift that anyone can make, opening the doorway to time-estimating, prioritization, schedule management, and more. It all starts with making time tangible.