Healthy or not, our modern life is a lot about “getting as many things done as quickly as possible”. We always strive for becoming more productive and better in managing our time. But how? Look around and you will be bombarded with books, life hacks and apps that will help you improve your time management skills.
Sadly, psychology research studies have shown that tools alone won’t get us very far. As it turns out, time management skill consists of three key components:
- Awareness: thinking realistically about your time by understanding it is a limited resource.
- Arrangement: designing and organizing your goals, plans, schedules, and tasks to effectively use time.
- Adaptation: monitoring your use of time while performing activities, including adjusting to interruptions or changing priorities.
For most of us, we obsess with the arrangement piece but ignore the other two. Too often we put too many things in our to-do list, and we jump from one meeting to the next. We do not devote enough energy on important tasks. Time is a limited resource, and some argue that one can only work on intellectually challenging and creative work for 3- 4 hours a day.
With these three A’s in mind, how would you change your time management strategy?