The business and psychology literature on the topic of time management and personal effectiveness presents a huge variety of classifications and approaches.

In the book “To Hell with Everything! Get On and Do It.” Richard Branson is one work in progress. David Allen’s “How to Get Things Done” has others. Brian Tracy, in his book “Effective Time Management,” has a special approach. Even the business coach, smiling from the banner on the website, most likely came up with something unique and unrepeatable, drawing 80% from the same sources.

Here are some basic principles to derive a logical structure of approaches to time management. You’ll probably find them in any book, course, and YouTube video on how to get started. Typically, you watch them instead of starting to do something.

Motivation

For starters, it’s best to figure out what you’re going to do and why. Each task you do, especially if it’s important and challenging, is obviously part of the bigger picture: your work, business activities, lifestyle or values.

You don’t have to analyze everything thoroughly, but if there is a serious impasse in a particular task, it may be worth looking at the situation in the context in which it exists. Why can’t you or why do you find it difficult to work on it? Why can’t you do something, or can you do it, but poorly and slowly?

A modest list of possible reasons is as follows:

• You do not consider it important, it seems meaningless to you, you do not see the value in it;
• Experiencing negative emotions while doing it;
• You lack the knowledge and resources to do it;
• You do not want to do it, but you have to;
• You are constantly distracted from your work by outsiders;
• There are always tasks that seem more urgent and pressing. Or they are handed to you and you can’t refuse, explaining your situation.
• Try to figure it out. If you find yourself in these situations regularly, and they are all similar in some way, perhaps you can get to some more general problem. An article on concentration can help you figure that out.

The Planning Principle

When you have done a little reflection on where you are, what you are doing, what you are going to start doing and why, there comes the moment of planning. And this is the main rule of time management, the cornerstone of the concept.

First you define a goal, then you put it in your plan to achieve it, then you start moving toward it. If the goal is simple, you just take it and do it. It looks simple. But a number of difficulties can arise.

• First, it’s not always easy for all people to start planning their day, or at least their work schedule.

That is, even the planning itself needs to be subjected to some management initially. Perhaps you don’t see the point in planning itself. There are many doubts that it will be able to make our activities more productive, to make life easier.

Indeed, if you’ve never done planning before, it can be hard to get started – it seems like there’s no time or energy to do it. But in practice, even a shopping list made in advance is able to save a lot of resources and greatly affect the result of such a seemingly simple and straightforward task as a trip to the store for groceries.

By making a list or checklist in advance, you know exactly what you need and do not waste time searching or thinking. Accordingly, you act as economically as possible: you immediately go to the necessary departments to the racks by the shortest route.

Even if you take into account the costs of compiling the list, you save a lot of time in the process. In addition, there is an opportunity to minimize the share of impulse purchases and save money. And the money in some iterations is again converted to time – this cycle works all the time.

• Second, some things don’t seem significant enough for people to single them out in any way.

Something just comes down from above and happens unexpectedly. In other words, making a list is almost impossible by definition.
Start with the basics. There are techniques according to which you should have no more than 4 most important things to do in a basic to-do list for the day.

And it is effective not when all the activities are exhaustively presented in the lists, but when the main things are completed and take less time. Don’t try to describe everything at once, leave room for surprises – they are inevitable.

The best thing you can do is set aside a separate block for relatively small tasks, each taking less than 15 minutes. That way you can finally make time for something you’ve been putting off for a long time. Just don’t forget to schedule time for rest as well. Take 10-20 minute breaks every 2-3 hours.

• Thirdly, you may start thinking, “I do not want to be a robot. But try to answer yourself honestly: do you really belong to yourself now?

How much free time do you really have that you can spend on vacations, socializing with friends and family?

Think about your health problems. Many people, including young people, have increased fatigue, defocused vision, nervous tension, chronic fatigue. Isn’t it to some extent a consequence of improperly organized regime of the day, work, rest? Modern medicine attributes many ailments precisely to disorders of the regime. In such cases it is impossible to make an unambiguous diagnosis according to the chronic pathology. Reasonable planning will favorably affect your well-being.

• Finally, don’t make up unnecessary problems for yourself. Planning is a means, not an end.

Don’t get hung up on standards, be an eternal student, and study time management from a scientific point of view. Show some imagination: your list, its structure and purpose are yours and yours alone. No one is checking it against the standards or grading it.

Another useful tool in the matter of planning is the Gantt chart. It allows you to visually structure a large project, track progress, and make it easier to get new people on board as needed.