Chapter 1
“I Have Time”
Time Management
I could write a whole book just on the importance of learning how to manage time so that you can manage your procrastination. It’s that important—because managing your time effectively can help you to feel in control and increase your productivity.
In all my years of coaching, the most heated debates and conversations about procrastination center on time management . . . or the lack of it. And it’s the issue I get the most pushback on from you, including these kinds of mantras:
“I have everything under control.”
“I’ll deal with it next week when it comes.”
“It will all get done in time.”
“I won’t forget to do it.”
“It’s on my radar.”
And my personal favorite? “I’ve got plenty of time.” Until you don’t.
So I need to ask: How are those working out for you?
For some of you, it might be working out just fine. Maybe you never feel rushed and you have plenty of time to do your best work on every project. But for the others, I’m thinking you might need to learn some basic time management skills.
Here are a few time management takeaways my students have learned along the way:
- There is NO way to stop procrastinating without focusing on time management. Usually they go hand in hand.
- You need to be able to see your time to learn how to manage it. And you do need to learn how to manage it. Because no matter how much you think you have it under control, at some point you will have that “oh, shit” moment on a Sunday night when you realize your poli sci paper (or calc problem set or chem lab report) is due the next morning.
- Time management is not just a school skill. (Do I have your attention now?) It’s a life skill. No one is going to give a rat’s ass if you studied for your Mesopotamia test in ninth grade. But your boss or clients or college professors will absolutely care if you are chronically late for meetings or deadlines or you don’t turn in that proposal on time. And they won’t care for the excuses that go along with it.
- You need to know how long things take you to do, how quickly time is passing and how much time you have left.
So if you’re ready to take the plunge, let’s jump in. Time is ticking.
Building a Time Sense
Do you really know how long things take you to do? Or how much time you have to get them done? For instance, how long does it take you to read a chapter in your English book? Or write a ten-page history paper?
The bottom line? To learn to manage your time, you must know how long it takes to get things done. There’s no magic elixir here. Guessing that you think it may take you a certain amount of time to accomplish something is probably as accurate as throwing a dart at the wall blindfolded. And trying to guess actually wastes time. Kind of ironic, huh?
Estimating Time
Let’s start with estimating time. Knowing how long it takes to make your breakfast, drive to school or take a shower is called having a time sense. Having that knowledge will help you set limits, plan, get started and stop procrastinating.
When I first start working with a student, I gauge their time sense by asking how long they think certain daily activities take them to do. Here’s how that conversation usually goes:
Me: How long does it take to walk your dog?
Student: Twenty minutes.
Me: How long does it take you to make your lunch?
Student: About twenty minutes.
Me: How long does it take to walk across campus?
Student: Around twenty minutes.
See the pattern here? It doesn’t matter what I ask. The answer seems to always come back to twenty minutes! What this immediately shows is that my student doesn’t have a very well-developed time sense.
You can easily do this test yourself. On the next page are a series of questions to see how in tune you are with how long things take. Feel free to add some of your own and skip the ones that are irrelevant to you. Make sure to write down estimates before doing each one. Then time your tasks as you do them and compare the estimates to the actual time it took.
How Long Does It Take You To . . . ?
| Activity |
Estimated time |
Actual time |
| Prepare breakfast |
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| Make lunch |
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| Walk your dog |
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| Care for your pet |
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| Take a shower |
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| Brush your teeth |
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| Watch your favorite video |
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| Watch your favorite TV show |
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| Listen to your favorite podcast |
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| Make your bed |
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| Do your laundry |
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| Empty the dishwasher |
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| Practice an instrument |
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| Text a friend |
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| Drive to school |
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| Walk to your first class |
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| Send an email |
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| Check Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat |
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| Plan your outfit |
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| Blow-dry your hair |
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| Stop at your local coffee shop |
Notice that I didn’t include any school-related questions. I want you to focus first on the activities you do on a regular basis, the ones that are super familiar to you and that don’t cause you much stress or require much brainpower. That should make estimating time for your routine tasks a bit easier than estimating for your school activities. (We’ll get to those next.)
Your answers to these activities will be most helpful in understanding where you sit in relation to time. If everything seems to take about the same amount of time, your time sense could use some major improvement. And if you are pretty accurate in how long things take you, you can use that information to help build up your time sense for activities that are unfamiliar or that you don’t do quite as often.
How did you do?
Let’s move on to estimating school stuff, such as writing a paper, reading a chapter, working on textbook questions or rewriting your notes. If something is a multistep project such as completing a long term paper, first break down the steps and then try to estimate each one. So instead of estimating “write paper,” your tasks would include such things as pick research topic, write thesis, choose five sources, take notes, create outline and so on.
This will be a LOT harder to do than your daily tasks. I know some subjects are harder for you than others. Or you might prefer one subject over another, which could cloud your estimates. Try to stay as objective as you can.
Write down estimates before doing each one, time your tasks and then compare the estimates to the actual time it took. Definitely do these exercises more than once! The more you record and see the difference between your estimated time and actual time, the better your time sense will become.
As you keep practicing, you’ll learn to adjust your time estimates on similar assignments as well. That’s the best part!
Use the form on page 17 to start estimating your time.
How Long I Think It Takes vs How Long It Really Takes
| Activity |
Estimated time |
Actual time |
You can improve your time sense even further. Try drawing parallels by comparing an unknown period of time or an activity you don’t often do to something very familiar. It might look something like this: “It took me thirty minutes to read two chapters in my English book, which is the same amount of time it takes me to listen to my favorite podcast.” Tethering something you are unfamiliar with to something that you do all the time will help you gain a better understanding of how long things take.
What are some things you can compare your time to?
Mapping Time
Now that you’re on your way to developing a time sense, you’re ready to start actually visualizing time. That’s no easy task.
Think about it. You can’t SEE or HOLD time in your hands, which makes time a very difficult concept to understand. It’s pretty invisible to most of us.
Learning to see time in more tangible ways can help take its invisibility out of the equation. Here’s one of my favorite student stories to illustrate my point:
Time-Tracking Instructions
Good Old-Fashioned Analog Clocks
I’m assuming you know how to tell time. And that you probably even learned on an analog clock. But I’m also assuming that once the analog clock portion of your math lesson was over, you rarely looked at another old-fashioned clock again. Let’s face it. It’s a digital world. And we’re all living in it. The thing is, a digital clock is not going to cut it if you really want to be able to see your time. Or plan it.
Why? Because time is three-dimensional. It has a past and a future. A beginning and an end. It moves continuously.
With a digital clock or watch you only see one aspect of time—the present. Go ahead and see for yourself. Grab your phone. I know it’s next to you.
Look down at it. What do you see? Is it 4:26 p.m.? Or 8:52 p.m.?
So riddle me this, Batman: If all you see is one time and that time is the present time, how can you know how much time you have left? Or how much time has passed? Even how far along you are?
Think about it. You started working on your math homework at 5:05 p.m. You need to leave for work at 6:15 p.m. It’s 5:43 p.m. Now answer the questions above.
Exactly. It’s kind of hard to do without doing some math. And doing that math isn’t always easy. And it takes time!
So what do we do about this? Easy fix. We hang analog clocks. IN EVERY ROOM YOU SPEND TIME IN. Including the bathroom. Especially the bathroom. And if you share a bathroom with siblings or in a college dorm, either invest in a small portable one OR get a waterproof watch with an analog face.
I know. I get a great deal of pushback on this. Most of my students say that they don’t need a watch because they have a cell phone. But during class or while taking exams, you won’t have access to your phone. And that is EXACTLY the time when a watch will come in handy!
Let’s dive into WHY an analog is the only way to truly see time move.
An analog with its hands lets you see time move and therefore where you are in relation to the rest of your day. With an analog clock you can see the present time (where the hands are when you look at them), elapsed time (where the hands were at the beginning of a period and where they are in the present) and future time (how far the hands need to move to get to a time).
Seeing elapsed and future time helps you learn these concepts and better understand how long you have for tasks and how much time before a deadline.
Are You Seeing the Future?
A crucial concept in time management is something called time horizon. This is basically how far you can look into the future to plan ahead. When you’re a very young child, your time horizon is super short, about an hour or so. As you get older, it gets further away. This allows you to plan into the future.
Here’s what I know. Most (not all) of you live in two worlds. The now and the not now. Now means right now. It could be 8:30 p.m. wherever you are, and you are just thinking about anything that is right in front of you . . . now. And then way over there (so far away you can’t see it) is the not now. That’s where your future lives. Two hours from now. Tomorrow. A week. Even six months.
And sometimes what you have going on later in the day or later that week or month can affect what you need to do NOW.
This is called your future awareness.
The thing is, you not only need to be aware of things happening in the future, but you also need to PLAN for them. Which brings us right back to the procrastination dilemma.
A lack of future awareness is a huge factor that contributes to lateness with deadlines, homework and lots of other stuff. Without future awareness, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish what you need to.
How do you develop future awareness? By seeing your time. And then planning it. We’ll get into all of that in the planning chapter.
Timely Tips
Are you feeling as if you’re getting this time thing down? Good! Here are a few more tips to help you feel in control of your clock.
Use alarms and timers. They help you to focus on what is right in front of you—or what we call present time, by being in charge of your future time. If you need to be somewhere in thirty minutes, setting an alarm means you don’t need to remember. The alarm does all the work for you! And if transitioning to the next activity gives you trouble, try setting multiple alarms to get you moving. When using a timer, I prefer visual timers over digital ones. Digital timers, such as kitchen timers, don’t let you see time actually pass. A visual timer does. So as the allotted time winds down, you can easily keep track of how much is left.
And a tip within a tip? Set your timer for an odd number. Setting a timer for a typical amount of time—say fifteen or twenty minutes—is boring and unmemorable. Try seventeen or thirty-two minutes. Why? Because odd is different and different is fun and fun is memorable. It will provide you that extra kick to get you moving.
Work time over task. When you’re told to “go finish your math homework before dinner” or your teacher says “Work on your science lab until class is over,” can you see the end? Do you know what “done” looks like? Most students don’t, and it leaves them feeling uneasy and procrastinating. Instead of sitting down to work with no end in sight, say, “I’ll write for thirty minutes before dinner or I’ll read for forty minutes before my next class.” Being able to see a beginning, middle and end to your time will help you activate and procrastinate less. And you won’t be staring down an endless tunnel of time.
And a tip within a tip? Use the Pomodoro Technique to help you work time over task. This popular time management method is really simple. Using a timer, you break down your work into twenty-five-minute chunks separated by short five-minute breaks. After about four Pomodoro rounds (if you need that many), you take a longer break of fifteen to twenty minutes.
Wear a vibrating reminder watch. It’s a simple-to-use wristwatch that can be programmed to send you discreet vibrating reminders throughout the day. Most watches allow you to customize your own personalized reminders or preprogram one of theirs. You set the timer, and the watch vibrates and displays your reminder. A perfect way to keep on time and on task.