Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves. – Lord Chesterfield

Everyone seems crazed by the desire to best manage their time in order to achieve an increased productivity. Such a great intention that is!…

The common definition of time management sounds something like this: management of time in order to make the most out of it. However, David Allen, in a 2001 interview, observed:

“You can’t manage time, it just is. So “time management” is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time; and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do.”

To better understand why time management is a mislabeled problem, you need to know what the word management means and what is its etymology.

Management is the guidance and control of action or resources that is necessary to reach a goal.

The verb manage comes from the Italian maneggiare (to handle), which in turn derives from the Latin manus (hand).

Knowing these things about management enables us to find out what time management really says: handling time to make the most out of it.

In a nutshell, what time management advertises is the ability to control time. A thing which, in my opinion, is false advertising…

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I am aware of the counter arguments to my opinion (metaphor, et cetera), but 80% of the people interested in time management are so because of the false psychological message transmitted by the name to their subconscious.

Activity managementTime is up

This is how time management should have been named, even if this may not sound so fancy.

The goal of activity management is to solve the eternal problem of too much action to be taken in too little time.

They say the average person has about 300 hours of projects to take care of right now. That includes you. And the fact is you will never get caught up with that unless you stop doing things.

What are the things you can stop doing?

Find that out by setting priorities using the Pareto principle.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many events, 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes.

So what you need to do is make a list of the 10 most important activities that you have to do each day and figure out which 2 of those activities are worth more than the other 8 put together. Figuring this out is quite simple: if you would be called out of town for a month in this moment, which activities will have to be done before leaving? Usually, the first two activities that come to your mind are responsible for 80% of your daily productivity and will have the highest priority on the list. Focus on doing them first thing each morning and try to discipline yourself to stay with them until they’re done.

Do not make the mistake of starting to work on the small things first, because you will notice that the small things will multiply like rabbits and you will spend your whole day working on small things that have insignificant returns…

From now on, start your day by completing the top priority tasks (the first 2 or 3 activities) on your top 10 list.

Pririties list

If you can develop the habit of creating this top 10 priorities list and start working on number the 1 first thing each morning, you will double your productivity from the first day of doing so, regardless of what your work is about.

Start now!



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  • http://www.mytata.net/ Time Management

    I’ve read similar arguement. Yes, it seems to make sense. Here there’s also an assumption, say, we’re referring to a specific demographics, collegue students, most of them tend to be fairly intelligent, so, they know what priorities they got, and they go for it. The thing is, even such being the case for them, they may not do (performa activities) as they plan to, that’s the reason why they need to constantly keep track of their activities and make realistic improvement for more gain of time investment.

  • http://www.mytata.net/ Time Management

    I’ve read similar arguement. Yes, it seems to make sense. Here there’s also an assumption, say, we’re referring to a specific demographics, collegue students, most of them tend to be fairly intelligent, so, they know what priorities they got, and they go for it. The thing is, even such being the case for them, they may not do (performa activities) as they plan to, that’s the reason why they need to constantly keep track of their activities and make realistic improvement for more gain of time investment.