By: Dawei Ji
This is when it all starts to falls apart. Midterms start. You start to realize that you haven’t been paying attention in class for the last month. You realize that Valentine’s day is coming up and you haven’t made any plans yet.. And all the commitments you set for yourself up in January all come back haunt you. Worst of all, you realize you may not have enough time go to the Gage events that your great RAs and fantastic GRA have planned for you.
Suddenly… you come to obvious conclusion that reading break will be your salvation. But this isn’t true, because nobody actually reads over reading break right? So what can we do?
There’s really only one solution: If the time doesn’t exist to do all the things you want to do, you need to add more time to your day. But how do we do this without breaking the space-time continuum?
It terms of temporal physics, this is probably impossible. But it terms of your life, this is VERY POSSIBLE. If you stop spending 1 hour of your day doing something that you doesn’t need to be done, you’ve just added 1 hour to your day. For example: if you stop going on Facebook for 1 hour in a day, you added 1 hour to the day where you can do things that are actually fulfilling, or important.
A cool thing to try is to literally track what you do every hour of every day (like on a spreadsheet or agenda) or if you’re really serious, every minute. You’ll notice that you spend a lot of time doing things are actually pointless and entirely unenjoyable. Every time I’ve done this it’s felt like hours of time have literally be added to my day.
Checking emails or surfing the internet endlessly, going to class but not paying 100% attention (resulting in needing to relearn material), reading internet articles that are temporarily fun but don’t add actual value to your life… these are widespread problems that can be quickly remedied by a conscious awareness that time is added to your day whenever you cut out the unnecessary and inefficient.
After time tracking, you’ll notice that we spend a lot of time procrastinating or thinking about things instead of actually doing them. Stop thinking about your problems and just DO what you need to do. Time passively thinking and passively avoiding a problem is often time that can be added to your day.
About 30 minutes ago I decided to write a blog post about something. I had NO IDEA what I wanted to write about. I was going to passively read some blogs for inspiration BUT knowing the wisdom of what is now this article, I instead just started to actively write. I started with the sentence “this is how it all falls apart”, and now I have an entire article about temporal physics and time management. That’s like 45 minutes saved right there! How amazing is that?
Seriously. It’s so easy. And it works!
Follow