What Is Time Management?

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Busy people often neglect family, health, and personal goals without realizing it.

Time-boxing your personal life helps you reclaim it before it disappears.

Research shows that scheduling leisure can reduce enjoyment, but not acting is worse.

Imagine a busy professional who wants to spend more time with her young kids. But she keeps getting urgent notifications on her phone and telling them, "Just a moment, honey." After a while, she looks up, surprised to find that her kids have left.

Imagine a different, equally busy creative worker who wants to learn a new language. Every time you talk to him, he mentions this goal. It has been the same goal for 10 years, and he has never gotten around to it. There is always so much to do.

Imagine a third, just-as-busy executive who is worried about her health and wants to eat better. Yet several times per week, she ends up grabbing fast food for lunch and dinner and gulping it down in a hurry while slumped over her laptop.

It will not take much effort to come up with similar examples from your own experience. Many of us are, and feel, extremely busy on a day-to-day basis, and cave under the pressure (real or perceived) to just do more, even at the expense of family, friends, hobbies, personal goals, and health. The consequences are lack of life satisfaction, neglected families, and persistent health problems. So if this is you, it is time to take action.

Protect your personal time

In a series of previous posts, I have been talking about time-boxing and task-batching: time-management methods where you collect similar tasks and schedule them into fixed time windows ("boxes") in a weekly schedule. The schedule is fixed before the week starts, and you adhere to it scrupulously. At the end of the week, you review what worked and what did not, make adjustments, and keep tweaking. Extend and shorten boxes as needed and move them around to suit your energy levels throughout the day. For example, do not schedule email in the morning if that is when you are most creative. Read more about time-boxing in these posts: The Power of Single-Tasking and How Busy People Protect Their Time.

You can extend your time-boxed schedule to cover not only your time at work, but also your personal time. If you want to learn a new language, write a book, or fix the yard, that is a personal goal. Put it on your list and schedule a time box or two for it in your weekly schedule, outside of working hours.

This works because time-boxing enforces single-tasking. When you are in a time box, your mind can let go of other tasks, because they have their own boxes. Your growing email pile should not intrude into your book-writing time box, because your brain knows those emails will be handled in their own slot. And during work hours, you will not be daydreaming about that long-awaited trip you want to plan, because your brain knows there is a scheduled time box to actually plan it.

By committing to a thoroughly time-boxed schedule, you protect your personal time. If fast food dinners over the laptop are a problem, time-box your dinners, including the time it takes to cook or go to a restaurant.

Should you schedule your leisure?

How far should you take it? Should you really time-box family time or date nights?

Generally, caution is advised. As I discussed in a previous post, research in psychology has shown that scheduling leisure activities the same way you schedule work can make you enjoy those activities less, because part of you may start to experience them as chores.

However, if you are so busy that you never have time for your partner or your kids, never have time to exercise, or never manage to eat a proper, healthy meal, it is time for drastic measures. Reclaiming what you have been neglecting takes priority. Worry about optimizing your enjoyment later.

What Is Time Management?

Take our Time Management Test

Find a therapist near me

So yes: if actually having time for family, friends, exercise, and healthy eating is a problem, time-box your entire week, including sleep. This is sometimes called "time-blocking," but the principles are the same. You schedule your whole week, review it at the end, and keep tweaking it once per week. When you are in a "family time" box, there is no email on your phone. That has its own box. Likewise, when exercise time or proper dinner time arrive, there is no other task on your mind.

If you decide to give time-blocking a chance to reclaim your personal life, keep three things in mind.

First, keep tweaking. Stick to your schedule for a week, but take notes on what worked and what did not. At the end of the week, review those notes and make adjustments. Do not obsess over a perfect plan: let trial and error be your guide.

Second, do not ruminate over results. You control the schedule, not the outcomes. If you thought you would finish a personal task within a time box and you did not, simply continue in the next one, perhaps next week. It is about getting time for yourself, not rushing through your goals. If you time-box your sleep and cannot actually fall asleep, do not lie there stressing about the fact that you are still awake. Just rest while you read or listen to a podcast. In fact, call it a "rest" time box, not a "sleep" one. The last thing you need is self-imposed pressure during your personal time.

Third, remember that completely time-blocking your schedule is an intervention for when you have lost control. Give it a few weeks or months, and once you have broken the habit of letting work spill into your personal life, try dialing it back. Return to a time-boxed schedule just for work, perhaps with a few added boxes for personal projects. After all, a schedule you no longer need is the best possible outcome of having had one.

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