Planning Your Time for Fun and Profit
Planning your time is among the most useful arts to practise. It helps you clarify what you want to do and how you’re going to do it. If you plan your time well then almost every other endeavour is improved. If you plan your time poorly then almost every goal you have will be hindered by this one oversight.
Here in roughly 1000 words is how to plan your time. If you can find a better guide, I would very much like to read it.
The first guideline: Aim to spend about ten percent of your (waking) time on planning your time.
This is probably the most valuable guideline. By following it you’ll sharpen your skills against many real-life examples. It’s more important than any specific scheduling system, technique, or device. Because it’s so important, let me address the obvious objection:
“Ten percent? That’s like an hour and a half each day. If I had that much free time then I wouldn’t need to be reading this stupid article.”
Three points combine to overcome this objection. Firstly, you don’t need to reach ten percent overnight to benefit from this goal. If you gradually increase your daily average, keep track of how many minutes you spend, and persist in spite of setbacks, then you’ll develop all the habits you need to plan your time more consistently.
The second point is closely related to the first: It’s largely the pursuit itself which is useful, more than any specific number of minutes spent. Thinking about when it would be convenient to plan your time for a few minutes, and how long to spend on each occasion is an exercise worth repeating. Finding time to plan is the gateway skill which leads to all the others. If you include planning as one of the items in the plans you make then before long the pursuit becomes self-reinforcing.
The third point is that planning can save time. By thinking through a task carefully you can reduce mistakes, delays, dead-ends, distractions, and forgetfulness when implementing it. If the time you save is more than the time you spent planning then you’re ahead.
So work towards spending 10% of your time planning. All other techniques are mere footnotes to that one.
But footnotes can be valuable, so here are some I think are important:
1 – Keep notes to improve your memory, not replace it.
If you cease to put effort into remembering your plans because they’re written down, then your memory will weaken from disuse. If you refuse to write down your plans because you want to exercise your memory, then you’ll have no backup, and may not even realise when you’ve forgotten something. If you practice recalling your plans but keep notes as a way to verify, and backup your memory, then you can have the best of both worlds.
2 – Keep a summary list for several time-scales.
For example keep a list of the top 5 to 15 things you want do in the next few years. Keep another list of the same length for the next few months. Keep one for the next week or so, one for the next day or so, and – where practical – one for the next few hours.
These five lists will serve as a high level overview of your plans. They include long-term context and short-term detail. It provides a useful starting point whenever you want to review your plans in general. More details for individual projects can be kept in other, project-specific documents.
3 – There are only four basic steps to planning. Whenever you’re not sure where to start, or how to continue, just run through them in order. They are:
- Scope: Decide what time-frame or project to focus on right now. Your different plans will affect each other, but you can’t think about all the details all at once. What you can do is focus clearly on one piece at a time.
- List: Decide what you want to include. The answers needn’t be perfect or final. Just start with what you know. Then consider what’s missing, what needs clarifying, changing, etc.
- Schedule: Decide when to do things, or in what order. To help with this step, you might think about how long each item will take, what needs to be done before what, or what depends on someone else’s schedule.
- Repeat: Don’t expect a plan to be perfect. You’ll learn from trial and error, from further thought, from other people, and from observation of facts and conditions. Much of the art of planning is refining existing plans.
4 – Prioritise.
Embrace wholeheartedly the fact that you won’t always finish everything on your list, and for all the things you do finish, you won’t always finish them on time. Some things will take longer than expected. Some things will just fail. New things will come up that deserve your attention, and some things will get in the way whether they deserve your attention or not.
For any time-scale or project, decide which items are the most important, and which are bonuses or luxuries which might need to be sacrificed for the sake of more important things.
Try to finish things early. If you succeed, then you have the bonus items to look forward to. If not, then at least the things you did were the most important ones.
5 – Add buffers.
When deciding how long to set aside for an item, add some extra time based on how important you think it is, and how uncertain you are about how long it will take.
Your plans make a practical difference, but more than this, they affect how you see the world. They change how you think and feel. Fortunately there is no shortage of opportunities to practice the art of planning your time, and no expensive materials are needed.
The End
Public Domain | 2021
What do you think? I would be grateful for any feedback
The Art of Planning Time 