Take Control of your Time

Recently, I came across a post on LinkedIn by Austin Belcak, founder of Cultivated Culture, talking about how he manages time between his full-time job and side gig. While the strategy he mentioned is the simplest, in my opinion, many seem to have a problem adapting it to their needs. I have been playing around with managing my time since 2008 and I thought I would share my experiences here with the hope that it might help others.

A lot of material is available on the benefits of time management, a soft skill, that helps people organize their work and achieve more with less stress. Few tips for effective time management are mentioned here. Currently, I am juggling between a full-time job, writing my master’s thesis, while also making time to meet interesting people via lunch club, keeping in touch with my friends and old colleagues, and not missing out on my badminton and trampoline sessions every week. I would now like to walk you through the process I followed to come up with a plan and work my way with it.

In 2008, I wrote a blog post about how I plan my time. I wrote that post as a conversation between two friends because it helped me with the flow of writing. Linda mentions here on how to take control of your calendar. The way I look at it, there are 3 steps to figure out the time we need to achieve the tasks we want to.

Step 1: Track where time is spent currently

This is the most important task, in my view, and “finding more time” is similar to “saving more money”. First, I need to find out where I am spending my time/money so that I know where I can cut down the expense. So, I started with a blank template at the start of the week and filled it as the week passed by.

The following are screenshots from the blog post, written in 2008.

I opened a new blank document in word and made a table as above. One could use Excel or just a piece of paper. I noted every activity to its most detailed level possible, and at the end of the week, the sheet of paper looked like:

The entries in black are the ones I cannot miss — essentials like going to work, eating, maintaining personal hygiene, grocery shopping and etc. Entries in red are “fillers” and those are the times I dedicated to learning a new dance form, my hobby.

Step 2: Continue this for a month

It is impossible to jot down every activity of life within a single week. So, continue tracking activities for a month. Fill them up on the sheet.

After about a month of filling up this sheet, there were some changes to it, and I had 95% of my tasks jotted down and planned. I used pencils, and additional colors to jot down one time activities or Adhoc activities. I knew that not much of it will change in the coming year ahead. The final plan in 2008 looked like:

Step 3: Analyze (and rework — if needed)

Now that I have a track of where the time is spent currently, it is easy to check which time slots are free, thereby knowing how much of free time I have to take up a new activity or task. I feel that having enough “rest” or “relaxing” time is very important (priority) and I would like to have at least an afternoon or evening free for that. Everyone has their own tasks and they could now partake new activities depending on their priorities.

Looking back at Fig 3, the items in blue are optional to me (for activities like catching up with friends, speaking to family and relatives, looking over at my finances/investments, reading new blogs and articles, etc). The unfilled or blank time slots are those which were open for unplanned activities (a friend would invite me for lunch or dinner, go to a movie, relax at home, read a book, etc). Those are the unplanned times and the much-needed break time.

Well, that’s it, as simple as that. I knew where I was spending time and where I could save time if needed. I had a fixed schedule for the next couple of years. Also, there were times in between where I didn’t have to have a weekly plan because I was quite comfortable with my routine. In 2012, I wanted to be sure that I could spare enough time for all the activities that I am interested in. So, I followed the 3 steps mentioned above and prepared my plan:

I wanted to get better at Swimming and I joined a local swimming club to get better. And hence it became compulsory in the morning to go swimming, which greatly improved my stamina and lung capacity but since I was on my own, there was no improvement to my swimming technique :-(.

In 2016, I was in Singapore and juggling between work, triathlon training, and freelance work. Then, my week plan looked:

I had to start color-coding the different activities so that it was easy to differentiate the priority of the activities. Tasks in Black are of the highest priority, followed by tasks in Red, followed by pink. I was pushing my physical boundaries by participating in triathlons. The activities in “pink” are all activities related to my triathlon training and they are of higher priority. The color-coding helped later when I started using OneNote to take notes on different topics.

Master’s, Tutorship, Freelancing

In 2019, I had many things happening at the same time and my plan looked like this:

The format changed from tracking time in blocks of 1 hour to blocks of 2 hours. This, I attribute it to me refining the process over the years and adjusting it to the current situation. All the lectures and teaching parts were of 90 minutes per session and it took me some time to get to the lecture hall and be prepared. So, I clubbed those times (walking to the lecture hall, etc) into the activity time.

I also had to track the hours spent on my teaching job, my Freelancing work, to be able to generate invoices to my clients. For tracking that time, I made extensive use of toggl track and generated reports. All in all, this helped me be productive and honest with my time.

Conclusion:

I listed the steps I followed to track my time and it helped me get better at organizing my time and having control over my time. While it might not be possible for everyone to follow the same method, it did serve me well over the years. So, my advice to anyone who wants to find more time: start with the first step of tracking, and I am sure you could come up with something that works for you.