An excellent question, indeed.
“Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold.” –Bacon.
Before we discuss how to best manage your time, it is important to understand what “manage” means. If you take a look in the dictionary, the first two definitions are:
1. To direct or control the use of; handle: manage a complex machine tool.
2. a. To exert control over: Managing the news… is the oldest game in town (James Reston). A major crisis to be managed loomed on the horizon(Time).
b. To make submissive to one’s authority, discipline, or persuasion.
I think the key point here is that to manage something implies that you have some control over that thing. Therefore, the most important aspect of managing your time is to be the person who has control over it! When you stop and think about it for a moment, you will see that most people do not have control of their own time! Most people give control of their time to other people (that’s called “working”) and then waste whatever is left because they’re too tired from “the job” to do anything else.
A week has 168 hours; let’s take a quick look at how they are usually spent. First, for health reasons you should probably be sleeping about 8 hours a day; that’s 56 hours, so you’re down to 112 hours left. If you have a full time job, that’s another 40 hours shot; now it’s 72 left. Some people commute an hour each way; that would move them down to 62 hours. Let’s take an hour a day for hygiene (sitting on the toilet, showers, baths, brushing your teeth, etc.) and another 2 hours a day preparing food, eating food, waiting in restaurants, cleaning up after eating, buying groceries, etc. That’s 21 hours a week, so you’re down to about 41 hours. Except that the average person spends about 2.5 hours a day watching TV or video (true! look it up); that’s 17.5 hours meaning that you’ve got a whopping 23.5 hours left.
Do you exercise? Shop? Talk on the telephone? Spend a couple hours a day online? Pretty soon you have 0 hours left.
What I’m trying to say is this: before buying another time organizer, write down EXACTLY how you spend each hour of each day over a two week period. This way, you will find out how many hours of “free time” you actually have to manage. Most likely what you will find is that you waste a lot more time than you are aware of. In other words, you are not in control of your time. Also, you will discover that a large percentage of your time is spent at the behest of somebody else! Other people are getting you to spend your valuable time on their behalf, not yours!
If, for example, you are able to do productive work at home on something that you would like to do anyway (i.e. a job that’s “not really work”) then you will find that you could save up to 50 or more hours per week!!! That’s called having a holistic lifestyle, and that should be your goal: no difference between work and play (which is one of the reasons I kind of liked the previous post’s idea of living on a ranch).
Prior to the industrial revolution, this is the way a lot of people lived. They could take 15 minutes from milking the cows to show their kids how to do something. It was holistic. But when the industrial revolution came along, people sold their souls (initially 12 hours a day 6 days a week, but now just 8 hours a day 5 days a week) by allowing their time to be owned/managed/controlled by somebody else.
I must reiterate: figure out how you are spending your time currently. How much of it is in somebody else’s hands? How much of it is wasted? You will get better dividends from understanding how you are currently spending your time than by trying to super-organize the tiny amount of time you really have left over after all is said and done.
Get it? You can’t manage your time unless it’s actually your time; not given away or sold to somebody else for a pittance. Kate’s taking courses and someday will be doing naturopathic nutrition (or something like that); it’s the right job for her because she’d probably do it for free if she could. Allen is building websites and learning business things and life skills at work; probably 75% of it he’d do for free if he didn’t have to worry about car payments and the like. This is the best way to live and it’s what everyone should strive for.
As Leonard Cohen (sort of famous Canadian poet/songwrite) once said: “I didn’t want to work for pay, but I wanted to be paid for my work.”
Humans are meant to be the sea otters of the universe.
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