Week 4: Time-Management
Over the past few weeks I have worked on the skills of coding, copywriting and graphic design (I’ve linked each article documenting my insights and what I have learned), and whilst learning each of these skills, I have balanced them with my university studies, part-time job, daily exercise and other activities. I found this to be the perfect opportunity to try out different time management techniques to discover the strengths and limitations of each and which one worked best.?
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the amount of time you allocate towards it. For example, if you set yourself the hours of 09:00 to 14:00 to write an essay, then that is how long it will take for you to complete it, even if you could realistically complete it by 11:00. The law conveys the idea that we often overestimate how long it takes to complete a task and consequently set aside too much time to it when it is possible to finish the task in a shorter time span.
There are probably many people reading this law thinking of a time when they left a task to the last minute (e.g. an assignment or essay for school) and the pressure of a looming deadline helps to take you over the line, only for you to realise afterwards that you could easily have done the task earlier in the day or week and could complete it much quicker than you had anticipated. This was highly applicable to many of the scenarios I had encountered, hence why I took a special interest in testing the law out.
To put this into practice, I looked at my list of tasks and priorities for the days of 13-15 April and listed out the tasks in terms of priority and which ones needed to be done first:
At the end of the day, I found the law had worked across the three days, to the point where I had 1 hour and 30 minutes to spare so I could work on another task (learning return statements and recursions in Python). Initially, I had expected to spend the entire morning and afternoon working on my coursework assignment, with graphic design taking up my entire evening. Giving myself tighter self-imposed deadlines helped me to complete more tasks than I had expected.
Whilst I had found success over the three days of implementing this, one thing to note was that the tasks I had completed were not the most complex tasks, and in such situations, it is much more difficult to figure out how much time should be put towards them as it is difficult to predict how quickly you can decode the details and complexities of the project or task. Moreover, this is more of a law rather than a technique and usually requires another technique to build on from this concept. The law works as a starting block, but a more concrete way of allocating time and prioritising tasks would be needed to make it work.??
Pomodoro Method
This was a natural follow-up to applying Parkinson’s Law as I began to assign my tasks into different time blocks and work in short bursts/sprints with small breaks in between. This is exactly what the Pomodoro Technique (or Pomodoro Method) is. A Pomodoro defines a block of time you have to sprint through a task with no distractions or procrastination and can often be quite intense to begin with due to the level of focus required to go through each objective.?
Typically a Pomodoro lasts for 25 minutes before a 5-minute break and goes again for another 25 minutes. This is how I began on my first day of attempting this, but by the third or fourth day, I managed to increase the time to 45 minutes with a 10-minute break between each. This meant an entire 45 minutes without checking emails, looking through my phone, keeping updated on football results or any other common distraction, which wasn’t easy at first but seeing how much more productive I got in the initial 25 minutes, I gradually began to increase the Pomodoro time by an additional 5 minutes for settling at a sweet spot of 45 minutes. After three or four times doing this process, you can take a longer break of an hour, to eat lunch, go for a walk, take a shower or any other activity. The shorter breaks of 5-10 minutes are useful to have a stretch, checking your phone for urgent messages or emails and other shorter activities.?
The example below is the same schedule as I outlined from Parkinson’s law, but with dedicated time blocks for each one:
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From exploring the technique, I can see that this would be beneficial for anyone reading who deals with large projects that can be daunting at first, people who complete tasks that require creative thinking and imagination, and anyone who generally struggles with constant small distractions around them.
On the flip side, this might be a challenging technique to implement for those who need to be highly responsive to breaking news, last-minute alerts and sudden changes, as part of their job. It is challenging to get into the flow state required for the Pomodoro technique when this is the case.
Eisenhower Matrix
I have referenced the Eisenhower Matrix before in one of my previous articles (the first I did on coding in Python) and that’s because it has been a popular one for many people. I have lecturers and fellow university students who use this method a lot in order to work in a more time-efficient manner. The table below neatly illustrates how the matrix works, but in short, the system helps you prioritise tasks in terms of urgency and importance (two of the key factors that determine how and when we arrange our objectives throughout the day). Following a ’brain dump’ where you jot down all the tasks you can think of that you would like to get done, the table helps you dictate what form of action you should take to maximise your productivity and best manage your time and resources. These are: do, decide (or schedule), delegate, delete (or eliminate).
In terms of its application in day-to-day planning, I found it to be clearer to understand from a visual perspective as opposed to the Pomodoro method but can also be time-consuming to list down all the tasks things we need to do and contemplate how important or urgent it is compared to the others. For instance, I filled out a table for 30 March before remembering halfway through that I needed to include an urgent and important email to send out and collect an important but not-so-urgent parcel. In addition, some tasks that you would like to put in the delegate section may not be applicable as you may find yourself to be the only one who is able to do a certain task. I wanted to include additional details to some certificates I had written for a group of athletes I coach as part of my part-time job; even though the task was urgent and not important, I was unable to delegate the task as I was the only one qualified to write these specific certificates.
Unlike the Pomodoro Method though, the Eisenhower Matrix can potentially work for those whose jobs require them to be on alert at all times for last-minute changes, so long as there are people to delegate certain tasks to.
Last thoughts
I sincerely hope the above techniques and my experience of using them help to give an insight into how effective each one is, which group of people they suit more than others, and in what scenarios you should look to implement each one. This is by no means the end of the journey as it pertains to exploring time-management techniques: numerous methods are out there that I would like to explore and potentially discuss in a future article if I find any valuable insights from them.