By MENGLIN “LYNN” YANG
Tiger Media Network
No one is born with time management skills, and no one advises you to waste your time. We are taught time management in elementary school, junior high school, high school, and even in the first class of college – don’t procrastinate, make a list of your plans, arrange them one by one according to priority and importance, reduce your sources of interference, etc.
This mindset can cause the feeling that not being a master of time management leads to not getting things done on time, while also promoting the idea that effective time management is necessary to solve all of life’s problems. So, I started spending more time studying how to plan and how to make timesheets instead of investing in specific plans. This may sound like putting the cart before the horse. Still, this behavior is something I only discovered recently after reading Jim Randel’s book: “The Skinny on Time Management: How to Maximize Your 24-hour Gift,” which solves the problem of how to manage time for readers effectively. Through paintings, the author leads readers to think about how to manage their time in a relaxed and humorous way.
Reading this book feels like listening to a lecture. This lecturer tells you why you should manage time, how to set goals when managing time, how to make full use of time gaps, how to improve memory, and how to handle multiple tasks. Randel says:
Using wasted time to do more meaningful things will make us more likely to seize opportunities. To control your future, you must control your time. Based on the future you want, set specific goals as the direction of action, and break the goals into small actions that you can do. Make reasonable use of the gap time to arrange the plans for the day in advance according to the priorities. Do things in a space where nothing will disturb you and challenge the most difficult things when you are full of energy. Ensure a healthy diet and adequate sleep, and combine skills to improve efficiency when doing things to maximize the use of time.
An initial feeling after reading the book was: Wow – instead of reading the book, search online for an article on “how to manage your time.” For the methods and concepts mentioned in this book, I have a more complete set of methodologies, techniques and examples in my mind. I can use more practical methods to explain them more easily than the author. It can be seen how many books and articles I have read on managing time and quitting procrastination.
So, while I realized it is necessary to learn time management, there is no need to learn all time management methods before starting to do things. If you pursue time management excessively and ignore the actual things that should be done to move toward the goal, it will become a waste of time. Giving up leisure, entertainment, spending time with friends, and not doing the tasks you need to do in order to learn time management is an act of putting the cart before the horse. We don’t need to figure out what priorities are, we don’t need to figure out what counts, we don’t need to pay too much attention to details, and we don’t need to waste time learning how to become a time management master. Even if we have not become masters of time management, even if we are just starting to learn time management, as long as you know “list the things to be done and do them one by one,” you will be able to do things well.