T I M E M A N A G E M E N T
priority score, decide how much time you want to allocate to each. A
two-hour task may not be worth two hours, particularly in light of the
fact that you have seven more two-hour tasks to complete today. So
decide to give it one hour of quality time. You can do this without a
great deal of anguish or sense of guilt, because one hour is all you’ve
got to give. With the focus that such an approach demands, you may be
surprised by how much you can accomplish during that hour. In soft-
ware development, this technique is called “time boxing” and is useful
because it recognizes and succeeds at meeting hard deadlines.
Evaluation
How will you know if it’s working? Give yourself enough time. It
takes at least three weeks to get over the novelty and the discomfort
of breaking patterns and beginning to establish a new routine.
Record your reactions in a notebook. You’d be surprised how
much your reaction will change in just a few weeks, so much so
that you might forget how you felt when you started.
Keep referring to your specific goals. Are you losing that pound
and a half a week? Is your new exercise regimen giving you the
increased energy and sense of well-being you hoped for?
Evaluate how the change is fitting into the rest of your life. How are
your loved ones reacting to the new demand on your time? What have you
had to give up to create time for the new activity? Is it a fair tradeoff?
Decide to stick with the plan for another three weeks, make nec-
essary alterations, or scrap the plan and develop a new one. These
are your goals, and you have the power to achieve them through
specific planning and disciplined action every day. Your priorities
and goals may change as your situation changes. As people grow
older, for instance, they may have a greater respect for free time and
less respect for money. Single people may have different priorities if
they marry and have children. The important thing is that we main-
tain control of our lives by deciding our priorities and how we spend
our time. Policies help us to live by design, not by default.