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home • APR 09, 2018

Time Management is about Values

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Steve Jobs

You turn to time management because you have more things to do than you have the time to do them. You find that you need to do more of the things that are meaningful to you and less of the things that you don’t care much about. It turns out that what is meaningful to you is what you value.

A great difficulty comes about when what you value is getting more things done. The goal is misguided. You can’t count the number of things you did today and compare with the number of things that you did yesterday and become elated about the growth. You’re comparing apples and oranges.

Choices amount to decisions based on values.

What are you going to say yes to? What are you going to say no to?

You are going to have to say no to a lot of things a lot more often than you’re going to say yes. Decisions are situational and the criteria cannot be set in stone. But you can use a rule of thumb most of the time to guide your choices and decisions based on what you carefully select as your values. You can’t work with hundreds of values, perhaps three or five or at most seven.

The reasons behind each value is more important than how many values you select.

You will find that you exhaust yourself in frustration if you attempt to identify a set of values that will not change starting now till the end of your life time. That is a search for the holy grail. You simply need to use your judgement to find what you think you should value now, based on your past and what you need to change about you. You need to be serious but not perfect.

You need to walk before you can run.

You will find that you will need to revise the things you value in the future if the circumstances demand it. The fact that you are changing them now is intended to improve your life compared to your past. When you change them in the future, it will be to improve your life further. This may happen when you graduate, get married or when you have children. It could even be when you get fired or quit your job.

Once you have chosen your values, you can then pick what things you will say yes to and what things you will say no to when they present themselves. You will even have to choose between things you value.

If you can do only one of the two, the criteria is importance. You will do only the thing that is more important and not the other one. This can be a hard choice.

If you need to do both of them, your immediate choice is based on priority. You need to decide what you are going to do first.

Then, there are things that are critical, the things that you have to do whether you like it or not.

Time management is a dance between the demands of life and what gives you meaning and joy. Be intentional about what you value. You will find that you can be much more flexible.