Time management methods and introspection.

I think time management has been really interesting for me these past few weeks. 

Naturally I have a tendency to postpone work that is due soon and find working on things that are not urgent more enjoyable, weirdly. And as soon as the not urgent becomes urgent I don’t enjoy it as much. Even weirder ? It does quite feel like self-sabotage sometimes. 

I believe that this happened because I never had a precise time table with allocated moments to tasks, but a rough view of what I wanted / needed to work on during the day. But giving myself a strict schedule and knowing I would be upset if I didn’t fulfill my goals led me to follow my plans quite well ! 

Did I mention that once I even did something that had to be done during the course of a week on an entire evening ? In insight I do think it was more because I’d rather focus intensely and work on something on a short period of time rather that dilute the work.. 

Working on time management and trying new working techniques was definitely a great way of introspecting on my relationship with work, or tasks in general. 

I also found really interesting to note that without an allocated duration to a task, things always tended to linger on, just because they could ! 

Now when I know that something needs to be done on a certain time it almost always works.

In retrospect this feels quite logical, it’s as if you’re giving yourself deadlines all the time.

But then why do I tend to postpone my app alarms reminding me to practice for 5 minutes meditation/gratefullness/mindfullness/newlanguage ? Here is a new introspecting opportunity. 

But I do find that precise time managing system really practical especially for research or thinking, ideating.. combined with 6hat thinking or tools such as « what is the logical conclusion ? Illogical conclusion ? ». For me when working on craft it is definitely harder to stick to a designated time. I believe that the problem here is that to ideate and iterate on craft, I need to go through a « technical » process which most of the time can feel quite like trial and error.

But I usually find that ideas come in easily. Most of the time not great or good ones for sure, but how liberating is it to be in a state where you notice ideas and connections flowing in. 

I remember during the past years staying stuck with my work partners on briefs, banging our heads on our tables or just staring at our tables, with glassy eyes. Not because we didn’t like our ideas but because nothing would come. 

The subway and commuting time was usually synonym of salvation. And even if ideas flow better now, yes we’ve heard it all before, the best ones are the ones that come when you’re not thinking about the problem. 

Now in a world where commuting is absent, finding a new way to get your mind in that mode is crucial. I find that being in the backseat of a car, driving on the highway with the countryside in plain sight is actually my preferred technique. 

For a few users I was rather spending a lot of time in trains and for a reason I can’t pinpoint it never worked there. As Gaby noticed, nobody reads SCABS so I can confess here that train journeys are rather great fantasy triggers.  

Hoping these next weeks will be full of new time management & work processed epiphanies.