Time Management & Organization

How do you keep tasks and events organized? Do you split things up day by day, hour by hour? (Smaller??) There's a lot of literature about it out there, including differing cultural time perspectives. I've tried a handful of planners in the past, getting as minute as 15-minute intervals for planning, but haven't felt entirely right with them. These days I use a journal with bulleted pages so I can make my own tables and boxes for things like weekly goals, long term project steps, reflections etc. alongside weekly or monthly calendar. The "Bullet Journal" method is also pretty okay imo, but it's a very generalized approach, and I ended up moving from that to my current bespoke timetables.

I'm sure anyone who has tried getting really specific with their timetables has experienced the wrath of the planner's fallacy--that nothing takes nearly as much or as little time as you think--which necessitates a flexible solution. I also believe keeping deadlines and appointment times are more important than making actual to-do lists, because those encourage procrastination in some cases. I've tried some, which include levels of prioritization, which I think is also a bit of a backwards concept: there's a business hierarchy concept called the Pareto distribution, which is an applied 80/20 rule. That is to say, in all kinds of things, 20% of a need tends to require 80% of resources to satisfy (80% of healthcare resources are expended on the most frail 20% of the population, 80% of productivity tends to come from the top 20% of employees). So in time management, 20% of your work takes 80% of your available time, which means conversely 80% of your tasks only take 20% of your time. But by prioritizing the difficult 20% of tasks, you end up neglecting the more achievable 80%.

I'll stop now! But I wanted to hear what you guys do for time management and what things you've noticed in your experiences with it.

Marine wrote

I try to use my free time to consume information, so I can draw connections between everything I learn.

I feel, I've added a reading list to my planner, along with periodic spaces for reflections on what I read, though I tend to keep my actual notes in the margins of the books themselves.

Backlash wrote

It seems my problem is a ton of "overriding factors" I've gotta deal with. Family stuff, friends going through a crisis, not to mention excruciating nerve pain. I'm lucky to do over half the things I wanna get done every day. Often less. >_<

Yeah I feel you, those cute boys are a big priority to work around. This summer I was just taking some summer classes, and had more free time than i do during the normal semesters. So I started doing all the things I'd wanted to do every day like studying personal interests, yoga, going to the nature center a couple times a week. Now it's like, man I was just cutting wood down with this chainsaw for four hours, my back is killing me, really wish I had time to loosen up but I gotta go out of town so bye. Going back to my normal work schedule has destroyed it.

I think I probably spend a couple hours doing non-work things as well, reading or playing FFXIV. I think I'd feel more satisfied if I did socialize while I did it like you, instead of doing games. Because basically where I'm at now is just cutting out that time to do those hobby-esque things. I legitimately don't know if it's worth it or not, like I don't think you can play at being something, at the end of the day. But sometimes you can't even know the future value of something without seeing it through first.I think everyone has that Billy Madison fantasy of going back and speedrunning your childhood thru highschool because you have the optimal path down now, like Classic WoW, but you only know those optimal routes because you've been through it all first, which is why you can't really apply it to your future self now.