From day 1 at Fontys, I seemed to struggle with my time-management, as family problems played a part in adding additional tasks and activities on top of the IBMS curriculum in my calendar and I started not being able to do everything that needed to be done in time. After trying out a few techniques and theories and failing to consistently get a grip on my planning to try and recuperate some of that lost time I discovered that I was not alone in this situation and started doing some research on how to best tackle this problem.
There has never been a larger selection of tools and technology, tips and tricks, checklists and calendars available and yet, a lot of us still seem to be lacking time. We are working and studying longer hours and we never seem to be caught up? Why is that so? Stress is at an all-time high and it seems that everything we know about time management is wrong.
The term time-management, is a logical one. It actually has several definitions but most come down to one simple definition; “the ability to use one’s time effectively or productively.” This definition can apply to everything in life. It can apply to work, school, sports, social life, cooking or even sleeping!
Regardless of how you look at it, but time management is not only logical, but also highly emotional. The way we choose to spend our time is not only logical, it is also emotional. Our feelings of worry, anxiety, distress and frustration, those feelings seem to dictate how we spend our time as much as anything on our to-do lists or calendars.
With this in mind, one could say there is no such thing as time-management. Time cannot be managed. In fact, time continues on whether we like it or not. This being said, according to Rory Vadden (Wall St Journal bestselling author of the book Take the Stairs), there is only self-management.
During the industrial revolution, early time-management theories thought in a unidimensional logical way. The solution for time-management comprised of doing things in an efficient way, in other words, efficiency was the solution. The idea behind being efficient on tasks and coming up with tools and technologies to assist us in getting our to-do lists done faster meant that if you could do something more efficiently than you could “save” time or “create” time and that in turn would give us “more” time. That being said, there is nothing wrong with efficiency as a time-management solution, efficiency is actually good however it has its limitations as a strategy for time management. This can be proven by the fact that most of us carry a pocket-sized computer with us and yet still seem to struggle with our own time-management.
A little more on time-management theory to further expand on the subject, in the late 80s a new era of time-management thinking emerged. Dr. Stephen Covey, introduced the Time Management Matrix which allowed you to prioritize tasks in two categories, one being task urgency and the other task importance. This could be applied to anything in life as well. The beauty of the Time Management Matrix is that it gave us a system for scoring our tasks and these scores could then be used for prioritizing tasks one in front of the other. Prioritizing means to focus first on what matters most and for the last 20 years or so, this has been the most prevalent way of thinking on time management theory. As much as there is nothing wrong with prioritizing, prioritizing has a massive limitation. Prioritizing tasks actually does not create any extra time for us. It is a valuable skill to have, but when it comes to time management it also comes down to just borrowing time from one activity to spend on another. It just shifts items on a to-do list from the bottom of the list to the top, but it unfortunately does not help you accomplish the other items on your to-do list.
A modern approach and increasingly getting traction on how to deal with time-management uses all of the above theories, but also combines it with a 3rd point to help us with time-management. This 3rd point would be the significance of the task. Highly effective people who seem to do this effortlessly add this 3rd point to the equation when it comes to time-management by asking themselves a really important question; What things can I do today that will give me more time tomorrow?
A way to apply this consistently would be by using the focus funnel. It is a visual tool that attempts to help you develop the ability to add significance to the equation when trying to determine how your time will be spent. It is a tool that I could not discover soon enough in my studies. It sounds very obvious once you see it and start to use it actively, because we all have used it in one way or another at some point in our lives but seem to not have noticed it on the occasions we unconsciously utilized it.
When describing the thought process of people that are used to thinking and utilizing their time with the focus funnel, the first thing one asks themselves is if it is even worth doing it. This is a dilemma that is usually one of the reasons why people struggle when trying to prioritize an items and tasks on a to-do list. What is important to realize is that saying no (eliminating a task) to a certain task today creates more time for us tomorrow. However, this can be a challenge for many people. We struggle to say no in a lot of occasions and so most of us try to never say no. But we have to realize that when we say yes to one thing, we are also saying no to an infinite number of things at the same time. The focus tunnel helps us break this emotional struggle by codifying this way of thinking and not making it seem a like bad thing.
The next part is especially important in business, can I automate this task? If you can automate a task and have a computer do it for you for example, then you can create time tomorrow by automating a task today. In business this would mean that our Return-On-Time-Invested would go up. In fact, automation is to our time the same as compounding interest to our money. Just like compounding interest takes money and makes it into more money, automation takes time and it makes it into more time. And if you cannot automate a task then you must delegate it. Which is useful in business but not so relevant in school where you cannot really delegate assignments, essays and exams to other people!
But at the end of the focus funnel, if you are unable to delegate a task, then it reaches the point where its importance and significance play enough a role and it is here you determine whether you will do this task now or later. If you decide to do it now than you must concentrate and do that task. However, if you ask yourself if the task can wait until later and the answer to that question is yes, then you will be procrastinating on purpose. Which means the activity or task will go back to the top of the funnel and eventually be executed in one the strategies’ steps, eliminate, automate, delegate or you yourself will do it. You will not do this forever however. If that task keeps going back to the top of the funnel, then you will eventually recognize that it can be eliminated altogether. You could then argue that procrastinating is a bad thing and the killer of all success. But when you procrastinate on purpose, it actually means to wait to do something because we are deciding that now is not the right time for it, which is different than waiting to do something that we know we should be doing but not doing it because you do not feel like it. Procrastinating on purpose is actually the same thing as patience. Which is a virtue. Patience gives you permission to put off insignificant things like checking e-mails 24/7 and focus on the what needs to get done.
Concluding my short essay on time-management, I would definitely suggest the Focus Funnel as tool for students struggling with their time-management at Fontys. It is a combination of well publicized theories and in combination with modern time-management technologies, it is a simpler way to plan your time more effectively than most of us are used to.