“He buggered off…”
-The Three Headed Knight, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Time management is a difficult skill that most struggle to perfect even well into their adult/professional life. There’s a lot that goes into it and requires discipline, planning, and sometimes, even luck. Only so much can be controlled at any given point in time and so managing what you can control is essential. Managing work and schoolwork can always be a challenge, especially when managing group work as well so one’s personal time management is critical.
Everyone has different methods to manage their time. That being said, here are some things that I find helpful when managing my own.
Breaking Tasks Down
When a task seems too big to accomplish, my first order of business is to break it into several smaller tasks that I can work on. Those smaller tasks should be divided in a way that everything that task is going to accomplish something related. From those tasks, create small steps that you can accomplish quickly and break them down again, and again, and again… until you are unable to and have a manageable task list. This list, made up of small steps, can help you accomplish larger and complicated tasks easily.
Scheduling Work Sessions
This, in my opinion, is the most important factor of time management but also proves to be the most difficult to complete. Why you ask? Well, life gets in the way and sometimes it feels like you never have the time. Even a 15 minute work session can be helpful (as long as it isn’t your only one). An important note here as well, scheduled work sessions should not be your only work sessions if you have a busy life. There are times in my life where I’m not always able to make chunks of time work so instead, I have periods through my weeks that are specifically scheduled for working on deadlines to ensure there is always progress made.
Make Your Own Deadlines
Finally, making your own deadlines for your tasks can help immensley with managing time. Here is a hypothetical for you: you have to finish coding the final dragon fight in the game you’re making in one month. Now let’s break this down into some manageable tasks. We need to create the dragon, the attacks, the room, and the flavor text. You can now set some deadlines for yourself – have the room finished by end of week 1, the dragon by end of week 2, the attacks by end of week 3, and finalize details/flavor text by the end of week 4 (the real due date). With that out of the way, there’s your fleshed out, detailed, dragon fight in a timely manner!
Managing professional, educational, and personal lives all at once can be difficult and is by no means an exact science. For the purposes of this blog, I definitely focused more on the professional/educational side of things, but hopefully this helps bring balance across the other aspects. After all, no one quite likes it when time just runs away.
