Personal Time-Management System 1: Record Yourself
Welcome to Elisi Inspiration!
Here, we will discuss topics on how to effortlessly make you and your life better, week by week.
We hope you will find some inspirational thoughts from Elisi Inspiration and join us to explore more insights and tricks for a cheerful and comfortable life.
Our first several weeks are about how to build your personal time-management system.
How do you record and distribute your day? How do you focus? How do you use your fragmented time? How do you motivate yourself in a long-term task?
Let’s see what we can find for our first week’s inspiration.
Personal Time-management System 1: Record Yourself
Before we manage our time, we need to know where we spend it – that’s why recording is necessary.
Recording mainly helps us in two ways:
1. To form a habit – recording can help us plan future tasks and review past ones.
2. To understand personal ability and limit of time control – people have different levels of time control, time use, emotional condition, and energy. If we overestimate or underestimate ourselves, we can sometimes frustrate ourselves with uncompleted goals.
We’d should not follow someone who continuously works 12 hours per day: and we should not be inspired by their story, copy their schedule directly to our calendar, and imagine an upgraded one for ourselves. That usually does not work.
We need to know ourselves.
So, how?
Former Soviet entomologist Alexander Alexandrovich Lyubishchev created a time-recording method in 1916, when he was 26, which is still used by people today. The main point is to only record your effective time:
• Record pure working hours without including chats and coffee breaks.
• Accurately record working hours. Subjective activities, such as meeting people and thinking about life, should not be counted.
• Choose the recording method that suits you – you do not have to pursue perfection of your form of recording.
• The recording error of a one-hour task does not exceed 15 minutes, as over-reporting only comforts you without accurately recording and truly understanding your time.
A two-week recording is usually enough to know where our time goes to. During these two weeks, take notes the following things everyday:
1. Total attention span
2. Attention span on a single task
3. How many easy tasks have been done
4. How many complicated tasks have been done
5. In these completed tasks, how many are you interested in
After having a rough idea of how you spend your time, now, you can make a plan for your tasks. Let’s talk about how to make an effective plan during our next week at Elisi Inspiration.
By Elisi Studio