Manage your time: do it a little at a time

Do you need a huge stretch of time in order to make inroads into a project? Not at all. With a change of thinking, you can make small steps—and your time management can improve by leaps and bounds…

Have you ever seen a young child begin to play? Or, more exactly, have you ever seen a young child think about beginning to play, and wondering whether there is enough time available to produce something of value. I haven’t. The fact is that young children don’t think about things too deeply before beginning an activity. They just do. And they can begin at any time of day, and—as anyone with children can attest to—especially when it’s close to bedtime.

It’s a great thing to be able just to get down and do something without worrying whether we have time to finish it or even achieve anything at all. But adults tend to think this facility is only for playing, for messing about, not for something serious like “work”.

We think that in order to accomplish something—especially a “serious” project—we need to have a huge stretch of time available. The amount of time we believe we need depends on the project at hand, and how complicated it is. But the upshot is that we tend to think that working on a project for just a few minutes is useless. We think we need to have a huge unbroken spell in order to really get into the work at hand at make progress.

Do a little and use time effectively

Is this true? Do we need a huge unbroken spell of time before we can work effectively on a project? There’s something to be said for not jumping blindly into work, for planning and making a schedule. But this is only for the stages before the project is begun. Once the project is underway, and the planning is done, there should be no reason to think deeply about what we have to do next. The problem is that because we only have a small amount of time we believe that we can’t accomplish anything of value in the time available.