How To Manage Your Time?

To make it short, just forget about it. Work is too dynamic to be able to predict a schedule and consistently live up to it. You will fail and you will feel bad about it.

What to do instead?

Focus on what needs to be done. Duh. :D

So what you need to do is to keep a list of things, regularly update the list and if you are lagging behind in getting things done, put more effort in to catch up with all the tasks. I'm kidding, DON'T do this. It's a trap.

If you are like most people, then you know, that things to do are always abundant contrary to our time, which there is never enough of.

There is a conflict here, between the things that need to be done and our time. Our job is to find a way to reconcile this conflict.

Now let's share the secret here.

1. You can't and you don't need to do all things.

2. Counter to intuition, you need to focus most of your time on things with the highest ROI instead of the things you think are "time sensitive"

The Eisenhower Matrix

"I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent" - Eisenhower

Let tasks go through the pipeline:

1. This important? No! This urgent? No! - Throw it away!
2. This important? No! This urgent? Yes! - Delegate!
3. This important? Yes! This urgent? No! - Work on this most of the time for the highest impact and most reward!
4. This important? Yes! This urgent? Yes! - Briefly pause #3 for this and do it now. Find ways of avoiding similar instances of this in the future.

You might not get the hang of it immediately but internalizing and optimizing this over time, will give you an immense progress boost in the long run.