Snippets 02
Written January 2017
To make things grander, I would say that after 23 years, I finally did it. I mastered time.
In reality I’ve only been working at something for 4 years and 9 months, and what I actually did is tell myself for the second week in a row that this week, I’m going to make use of every second.
I have always struggled and pondered about the concept of managing my time to produce the best work. For many years my go-to method was to watch out for a piece of my life where I get to have 4 – 6 hours to myself so that I can lose myself in my work be it a report for school or a project for a client. I happened to have this sort of time on my hands at a point. The ironic part, is that I wasted a lot of time just so that I can get those 4 – 6 hours of flow.
Studies show that in an 8 hour day most people only work for two of those hours. I’ve found that I’m the kind of person who can do focused work for four or five hours straight. Non-stop. I had been very confident that once I get in the zone and disappear and I can complete anything so I procrastinated alot and I put things off until I could and then pulled all-nighters of focused work. It goes without saying that such a method is very destructive. It got so bad that when my life changed and I didnt have so much time on my hands I wasn't getting a lot of work done because I was waiting for 4 hour time slots that I could get stuff done. But that wasn't working out which brings me to the first lesson. If you have the luxury of picking your hours
Make time for what needs to be done, don’t wait for time to simply appear.
I gave upon waiting for 4-hour time slots and I had resolved myself to never getting it. If I can’t get 4-hours then I’ll make use of every opportunity even if it’s only fifteen minutes to do some work and slowly but incrementally finish what needed to be done. Bad idea. I get distracted easily. There may be people like me, once I start, I keep going but if I can’t get rolling then I never start and I never zone. If I never zone then I never do the kind of quality work that I know I can do. Which meant I always felt as if I was limited from reaching my full potential. 15-mins, 30-mins wasnt enough for me to do focused work.
Your best work comes from your continuous focused work time.
However before I really realized that, I worked for irregular periods of time and I just managed to get things done. A new problem came up, I had trouble prioritising what to do. I had the Any.DO app already, but this time I took it more seriously, I paid for the Pro subscription just so I could have greater control over the timing of tasks. So I began to schedule tasks to be done using Any.DO. This worked out fine for a time, until I started to postpone tasks for later because I needed a period of focused work to do it and while i waited for that to appear I was steadily building a backlog of important tasks. One day I realized that I has snoozed the same task for 3 months and I had a long list of things that I hadn't done. Something had to break. Any.DO just became a tool for procrastination. I learned something very important about tasks.
Tasks only need a time and place to happen.
After you get the system rolling and you achieve consistency, you’ll find that mastering time isn’t about knowing how to schedule tasks and events using a fancy app, it’s about knowing what to schedule for when and more importantly it’s about committing to yourself. I will make every second count. That way even when you have nothing scheduled, you never waste time.
UPDATE: It's 2018 I haven't mastered Time, but I've gotten a lot better at trying. You Live and you Learn.
