Time and task management
Are you too busy and don't want to go crazy? Struggling with how to organize your time for work and play? Can't keep up with your homework?
If you look through various manuals and guides on how to be creative or manage stress and study well, you will often come across three distinct points:
Think positive - don't plan for disaster scenarios; try to nurture your friendships, reward yourself and do meaningful things. Seligman shows that when a person thinks positively, they are more effective, more creative, and also healthier and more successful.
Set realistic goals and break them down into small, relatively easily achievable chunks. You'll find it easier to plan and evaluate, and more often than not, you'll be happy that you've achieved them. At the same time, with education, even if you don't get to the end, even partial fragments are helpful.
Plan - don't fall into what is sometimes called creative chaos. Try to manage your time, fight procrastination and have a system in what you do. Truly creative people almost always have their lives riddled with rituals, habits and rigid structures that untie their hands to creative thinking. The Benedictine motto, "keep order and order will keep you", could be written above everyone's bed. This is not about fear or refusal to improvise but about trying not to drown in petty organizational processes.
To help you plan better, it's good to know at least some basic time management techniques. And tasks:
Timeboxing is a simple method for marking periods in your calendar when doing your chosen activity. It is not possible to shorten or lengthen them ad hoc.
Pomodoro - a method based on alternating 25-minute work blocks and 5-minute rest periods.
ToDo lists - a method that everyone is familiar with, involving creating a list of tasks that are then "checked off".
Time tracking is a method based on measuring the time taken by each activity. You can then analyse this and change your study or work habits.
GTD - "having it all done" is a relatively robust and complex technique by David Allen, based on the idea that you need to have all the activities planned and distributed in advance and not delay managing and organizing them during the work.
Information hygiene and information overload are closely related to time and task management. If you live in a world where new information is constantly appearing around you, you need tools or mindsets to help you work with it. To set what you want to learn, to be able to disconnect from the internet or not answer emails in the evening. If you overload yourself with information, you will lose motivation, work performance, flow, and creativity. It is, therefore, essential to look for strategies that will effectively prevent these problems.
