PDF Summary:The Master Guides: Time Management, by Shortform

There’s so much to do and so little time. Everyone has goals to achieve and dreams to make real, but our time to pursue them runs out too fast and gets filled with constant distractions. Is there a better way to manage time so we can get more out of life and our careers while not always feeling that there’s too much to do?

In this Master Guide, we’ll discuss how to prioritize what you spend time on, how to plan your schedule and keep track of how you use your time, how to avoid distractions and stave off procrastination, and how to balance your life so you can enjoy your time as you use it more wisely. To do so, we’ll pull insights from the writings of Stephen R. Covey (First Things First), Gary Keller (The One Thing), Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!), and many others.

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Make sure not to schedule every minute of each day so you can maintain flexibility for unexpected problems and opportunities that arise. Covey warns that you’ll inevitably face challenges in your schedule and will need to make decisions in the moment about how to proceed. Like Tracy, Covey says to start each morning by reviewing what’s on your schedule and prioritizing your tasks. Look for time-sensitive commitments and watch out for pressing but not significant activities that might have crept into your schedule. Those and tasks that aren’t time-sensitive can be pushed aside if unexpected emergencies come up.

Step #3: Track Your Time

It’s not enough to have a general plan of how you’re going to use your time in advance. It’s also important to track what you’ve done so you can measure how much time you spend on any task, judge how effectively you use your time, and determine what adjustments you should make to your schedule. There are several productivity tools to help you do this. The ones we’ll cover here are bullet journaling and the kanban technique.

Bullet Journals

A bullet journal is an organizational tool introduced by Ryder Carroll in The Bullet Journal Method to help you be intentional about how you spend your time and energy. It’s a system that archives your life—past, present, and future—tracking not only the day-to-day details but also your choices, your actions, and how you’ve changed over time. Carroll claims that bullet journaling can aid you in three areas: getting organized, living in the present moment, and finding clarity on what’s important to you. Better yet, the only tools bullet journaling requires are a notebook and a pen.

Carroll explains that throughout the day, you’ll write down tasks, events, and notes that are relevant to you, using as much space in your notebook as you need. To record your information in the most efficient way, he recommends that you use “rapid logging”—a streamlined method of taking notes that focuses on only the most essential information. However, the process doesn’t end there. In bullet journaling, you don’t only record information, you also re-engage with it later.

Through a process Carroll calls migration, you actively assess everything you’ve written and transfer it from one part of your journal to another (or even one journal to another) through daily review, monthly review, and yearly review. Moving information encourages you to reflect on every entry you record, which helps you spend your time and energy with intention. Without this built-in reflection, you’re likely to lose track of not only what you’re doing but why you’re doing it.

The Kanban Approach

Kanban is a visual tool first developed by Japanese automakers to keep track of tasks as they move through your workflow. In Personal Kanban, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria explain that, in its most rudimentary version, a kanban is a chart divided into three columns—“to do,” “doing,” and “done.” Unlike to-do lists that simply show tasks until you check them off, a kanban board displays a task’s entire life cycle. Every task (usually written on sticky notes) begins in the “to do” section, moves to “doing” once you’ve started working on it, and eventually makes its way to “done.” The catch is that you’re only allowed to have a handful of tasks in your “doing” column at any one time—perhaps as few as two or three.

A personal kanban board tracks all your tasks, no matter their size, importance, or type. Once you start paying attention to your work patterns, your kanban board will show you at a glance where your bottlenecks are, the tasks you’re struggling with, and how much more work you’re able to take on. Having all of your tasks in one place helps you identify the right task to do now, whether that’s walking your dog or preparing for a meeting, making sure your energy is going where it will have the most impact. Also, by putting a limit on how many tasks you’re working on at any given time, you ensure that you’re only focusing on priorities you can accomplish.

Step #4: Stay on Target

Once you start regularly tracking your time, you may become acutely aware of all of the forces trying to derail your plans. It takes practice and a conscious act of will to stick to your schedule and avoid distractions, whether they’re external (such as phone notifications) or internal (such as procrastination). We’ll look at the easy part first—external distractions—before tackling the more difficult emotional hurdles that trigger procrastination. If you can overcome your emotional roadblocks, you can make time work for you rather than be something you have to fight against.

Digital Distractions

The barrage of modern media is so overwhelming that it takes more than sheer strength of will to keep it at bay. In Make Time, tech industry insiders Jake Knapp and John Zeratzky assert that you have to deliberately put barriers in place to keep your devices from stealing your time. The single most pernicious device that impinges on your schedule is your smartphone. Knapp and Zeratsky recommend that you delete all social media apps, games, and even your email from your phone. If that’s too extreme, they suggest you turn off all notifications and remove the apps from your homescreen, forcing you to choose when to use each app.

In the workplace, the other main external distractor is email, which many of us feel obliged to respond to, even if it isn’t important and we have to drop whatever we’re doing so we can reply to a message. Knapp and Zeratsky offer several strategies to take control of your email time, such as only responding to email at the end of the day, or maybe according to an email schedule in which you only check it two or three times per day. (This can be especially useful if you communicate with people in various time zones.) Whatever you do, you should budget email time in your schedule, using apps to lock you out if you have to.

Procrastination

Unfortunately, there isn’t an app that can easily stop you from procrastinating. In The Procrastination Cure, Damon Zahariades says procrastination is to delay action on something that’s in your best interest to do now. Most reasons for procrastination are rooted in the fact that your brain prefers immediate rewards to delayed gratification. Put another way, procrastination is a conflict between the interests of Present You and Future You. Present You wants to have fun, even if it makes life hard for Future You. The more difficult and complex a task is, the greater the incentive your brain needs to do it. Meanwhile, the future’s uncertainty makes thinking about your future’s best interests anxiety-inducing and something to avoid.

Therefore, Zahariades suggests that the emotional culprit behind most procrastination is fear. Your fear can take many forms, such as fear of failure or fear of success: When a task involves something you don’t believe you’re good at, you’ll naturally want to avoid it. Conversely, you’ll also avoid doing a task if you’re nervous about what might happen if you do it well, such as increasing your workload or putting yourself under more scrutiny. Zahariades suggests shifting your perspective or using logic to expose your fears as irrational. Reframe failure as a chance to learn, evaluate how realistic your fears are, and consider the outcomes of procrastination, such as feeling overwhelmed later while you’re scrambling to meet deadlines.

In The Now Habit, Neil Fiore recommends that you change your relationship with work and leisure time. First of all, you should change your self-talk. Procrastinators typically talk to themselves in “have to” and “should” statements—both of which build negative feelings that lead to procrastination. Fiore says that you can shift your self-talk to emphasize personal choice—for instance, instead of saying you “have to” or “should” do something, tell yourself you “choose to” or “want to” do that thing. This kind of reframing removes unnecessary stress and judgment from your self-talk and puts the emphasis on your desires and your freedom to choose.

Making Time Flow

Fiore argues that you can avoid procrastination if you design your schedule so you can enter a state of flow—a feeling of enhanced calm, concentration, and creativity. Fiore suggests that you can enter a flow state by performing focusing and relaxation exercises, which combine deep breathing, mindfulness, and affirmations. The concept of flow, first coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a frame of mind in which you become so engrossed in what you’re doing that you enter a state of optimal creativity. Managing time is no longer an issue—you may even lose the sense that time is passing. When you enter a state of flow, you experience true enjoyment, control over your feelings, and a greater sense of purpose and meaning.

Although you’ll probably feel relaxed when experiencing flow, Csikszentmihalyi found that people experience flow when they deal with challenges that engage an above-average number of their skills. He also found that the more regularly a person is in flow, the more likely they’ll describe feeling active, creative, and motivated. Unfortunately, it might not always be possible to enter a flow state on demand. Csikszentmihalyi says that in some cases, you might need to change jobs in order to find work that triggers flow for you.

Step #5: Balance Your Life

The psychological benefits of flow illustrate the most important point to remember when managing your time—you’re not a machine. The ultimate goal of time management isn’t just increased efficiency; it’s finding a way to improve your quality of life. To conclude this guide, we’ll discuss modern attitudes about the scarcity of time, how to make room for activities you enjoy, and why it’s healthy to acknowledge that time will never be completely under your control.

In Do Nothing, Celeste Headlee says that though people today aren’t working longer hours than we did during the Industrial Revolution, we still feel exhausted and overworked. This is partly because as hourly wages and salaries increase, we perceive our time as more valuable, and as a consequence, it also feels more scarce. Thus, we feel anxiety at the prospect of wasting time and being unproductive, so even when we’re not at work, we feel we should still engage in some form of self-improvement or advancement.

Headlee's first piece of advice is to do more focused work so that you can work fewer hours while getting the same amount done. If you have flexibility in your schedule, consider working for about 50 minutes at a time, followed by a 10- to 15-minute break to recharge. Another option is the Pomodoro technique of working in focused 25-minute work sessions, followed by five-minute breaks, with longer 15- to 30-minute breaks after every four focused-work cycles. Whichever strategy you use, Headlee also suggests not working any more than your job requires. The stress and exhaustion from being overworked isn’t worth the career benefits you may or may not receive for your efforts.

Perhaps even placing work first is a mistake. Neil Fiore argues that you should plan your week around your leisure time. Start by writing down specific appointments and necessary activities, then add scheduled leisure time, including play, socializing, hobbies, and self-care. Fiore recommends at least half an hour of recreation or relaxation per day, as well as dedicating one day per week entirely free of work. This improves your free time and work time, since putting leisure first lets you see how little time for work you actually have—which in turn motivates you to make the most of it. Fiore says that this approach lets you take time to play and not feel guilty for it.

Letting Go of Time

As much as you try to manage your schedule, total control over your time is impossible. In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman argues that the more tasks you complete, the more tasks will appear to occupy your newly freed-up time. Similarly, if you accelerate your pace at work to complete all your tasks more quickly, you’ll feel forced to increase that acceleration in the future. This is because, in our productivity-focused world, expectations only go up—they never go down unless something goes wrong. For the sake of your energy and your mental health, prioritize only those tasks that matter most. Don’t take on more than you can handle, and be open to the future veering away from what you’ve planned.

Finally, Burkeman says that once you accept that you’ll never wield total control over your time, you should align your schedule with the schedules of the people you want to spend time with. Even though structuring your free time around other people’s schedules initially seems restrictive, you’ll be much happier and feel less isolated. After all, the point of time management isn’t to bend time to your will—it’s to let you enjoy the time that you have as much and as often as you can.