Manage your time: do it a little at a time

Do you need a huge stretch of time in order to make inroads into a project? Not at all. With a change of thinking, you can make small steps—and your time management can improve by leaps and bounds…

Have you ever seen a young child begin to play? Or, more exactly, have you ever seen a young child think about beginning to play, and wondering whether there is enough time available to produce something of value. I haven’t. The fact is that young children don’t think about things too deeply before beginning an activity. They just do. And they can begin at any time of day, and—as anyone with children can attest to—especially when it’s close to bedtime.

It’s a great thing to be able just to get down and do something without worrying whether we have time to finish it or even achieve anything at all. But adults tend to think this facility is only for playing, for messing about, not for something serious like “work”.

We think that in order to accomplish something—especially a “serious” project—we need to have a huge stretch of time available. The amount of time we believe we need depends on the project at hand, and how complicated it is. But the upshot is that we tend to think that working on a project for just a few minutes is useless. We think we need to have a huge unbroken spell in order to really get into the work at hand at make progress.

Do a little and use time effectively

Is this true? Do we need a huge unbroken spell of time before we can work effectively on a project? There’s something to be said for not jumping blindly into work, for planning and making a schedule. But this is only for the stages before the project is begun. Once the project is underway, and the planning is done, there should be no reason to think deeply about what we have to do next. The problem is that because we only have a small amount of time we believe that we can’t accomplish anything of value in the time available.

A way around this problem is to take a child’s view of time management—that is, that all time is there to be used simply to do something. And instead of thinking that the project is “work”, with a serious outcome, why not think of it as “play” with no outcome at all? This doesn’t mean messing about and producing bad work. It means just start to work on the project whenever you have spare time. Even if you have just a few minutes, take a look at a project and see what can be achieved in the time available. You’ll find that there’s usually something that can be done, and over time those small pieces of activity will add up to something much greater and move the project along to completion at a much faster rate.

Get started now

Another thing you will find is that one of the main problems is not that it’s difficult to achieve anything in the short amount of time available. The problem is simply getting started at all. If we use the child’s technique of just getting started without thinking of the outcome, we’ll often find that there is something to be achieved in the short time available… but we wouldn’t have known that unless we’d got started in the first place.

Once you get started you can decide what you want to achieve in the time available—you use “childish” thinking to get started and then “adult” thinking to plan the time available to get the best out of it. You can’t manage your time if you don’t know what needs to be done or what can be achieved. And once you start, you’ll usually find that you’ll get more achieved than you imagined.

You can use this time management technique with all sorts of projects, and I guarantee you’ll find projects being completed much faster than you imagined. For the next month, try using your time in this way and see how much more you get done.

It takes to get into the habit of using your time effectively in this way, but once it becomes a habit you’ll find that jumping into a project for a few minutes and achieving something becomes literally child’s play.