Elastic TIme
Laura Vanderkam gave a TED Talk a couple months ago on how to gain control of your free time, a discussion of time and priorities.
(side note - TED talks "titles" on Youtube are all lowercased, save the first word, leading me to believe that these are unofficial names of the talks.)
Laura starts out trying to dispel a few myths; the kind of things that people assume about time management speakers like herself, and the kind of click-baity time management tips that pervade the internet.
But she quickly gets to the heart of what time management really is. It's not shaving bits and pieces of time off of all your tasks, its doing things that you've set a priority to do.
Everyone has to deal with emergency situations occasionally, like a water heater blowing up in your basement, for example. Your current schedule doesn't accommodate for it, so you have to reshuffle your priorities to put the flooded basement on top, you are forced to accommodate it.
It's then an interesting challenge to tackle the things that you want/need to do for your life and career with the same kind of urgency as that water heater.
Your time then, is a choice. When you say that you don't have time for something, you're really saying that its not a priority. Because you will always make time for your priorities, whether the forces at work come from within or without. Time is Elastic.
Laura presents a strategy to time management based on almost tricking yourself into urgency, accomplished through a type of forward-thinking. She suggests to do a yearly review on yourself, a year in advance or plan out your week the Friday before, the point where you are the most relaxed.
Really, my biggest takeaway was something Laura said almost in passing.
"Small moments have great power."
In my personal experience, Laura's strategies are difficult to apply, since I don't know what my primary job will be in a year and currently, my schedule changes almost day-by-day according to the needs of my work. And my part-time hotel job is on the weekends, Fridays evenings are far from my most-relaxed times. I feel like if I ever get a standard 40-hour work week, I'll be legendary at productivity.
But I find that my biggest time-waster is just the small moments, the times when I sit and watch short Youtube videos, or browse Facebook for a few minutes, which start to pile up over time. The bite-sized portions of the media I consume in these moments make them feel like you aren't eating up that much time, ("eh...just one more is fine...") and it's this mindset that causes me to watch Youtube for hours on end.
I think I need to learn to keep these bite-sized moments from piling up. I think what I'll do is never allow myself to watch more than two videos, or I'll set a browser timer. Or even just do something else. I've called myself a binger on both my work and play, and like a person with an eating disorder, I think I have to ration my information diet.