Monday, February 1, 2016

Time Management Systems (Part 1)

One of my passions is time management as anyone who knows me is very aware. I have been building time management systems since I was in highschool. Something about the idea of being more efficient with my time really excites me. It is a branch of one of my main passions which is resource management (using resources as efficiently as possible), which I'm sure I will discuss later. Time is one of the easiest resources to manage if you have the will power, but possibly the hardest if you don't. I often struggle with that willpower, that is why I have created systems so that I don't have to use as much of it and the system can do most of the work. Hopefully it will be useful for many of you out there.

I'm sure all of you have used, or at least heard of, many different time management systems. Today I am going to talk about the similarities between many of them and the shortcomings I see. In later posts I will explain how my systems try to fill in the gaps that these other systems are missing.

Most time management systems follow, at least to some degree, a similar framework. It's usually something like:

Visions: Who you want to be, who you want to be with, what you want your life to be like, etc.

Goals: Specific steps you need to take to move you towards your vision.

Plans: How are you going to accomplish your goals?

This framework can be scaled to any timeframe. 10 years, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly even.

This framework is very powerful and I believe that it is following natural law (Which I will talk about in detail later. Basically universal principles that give a predictable outcome when followed correctly). Most time management systems use something similar to help people improve their lives.

Where the time management systems differ is in how to put the plans into place, and how to stick with them once they are planned.

The problem that I personally have with every system I have tried is it always takes discipline to plan every single day. I need a system that can plan itself! And that is always what I have attempted to do.

Another shortcoming is that most systems have a hard time helping a person balance their life. What do you do with your freetime? Do you plan every available space? How do you make sure that you aren't burned out? Some systems try to address this in different ways but I've never found one that is easy but also effective.

I want my system to be very easy to use but very powerful at helping me achieve my dreams. I hope by sharing this with you I can help you to do the same.

Later on I will share some of my ideas to make this happen. But until then, what problems do you have with time management, or, how are you making it work?