Mastering Time: What It Really Means

Despite its name, time management isn't really about controlling time, but rather about consciously managing our actions within it. This includes being aware of how our time is spent, allowing us to deliberately plan the use of our available time in relation to specific tasks. It involves not only setting and prioritizing goals but also making mindful decisions about what to dedicate time to and for how long. For example, balancing a work project, a team meeting, and a family dinner requires not just effective prioritization of tasks but also an awareness of how time is allocated to each activity, helping to prevent feelings of overwhelm or stress.

Conscious time use

Balancing work and personal life is crucial but challenging. We often don't realize how much time we spend on different activities both at work and at home. Keeping track of our time can reveal different thought patterns and attitudes behind how we allocate our time each day and help us address feelings of overload, low energy, or being stuck. Becoming more aware of how we spend our time and how much time we actually have can help us set realistic tasks and goals that fit within our available time. Effective time management can lead to stress reduction, increased energy, enhanced goal achievement, and better task prioritization.

Research highlights the importance of time management behaviors, including time tracking, and their impact on work performance, job satisfaction, and reduced work-related stress. A 2017 review of studies looking at time management (Aeon & Aguinis, 2017) found that people who view time as a resource and as the main currency of their mental and physical resources tend to use their time more effectively. Effective time management was found to be linked to stress reduction, increased energy, enhanced goal achievement, and better task prioritization. On the other hand, those who don’t view time as a basic resource have more difficulty in effectively managing time.

Exercise: Time Management

Your responses to the exercises are solely for your own reflection and will not be used for research, reporting, or any other purposes.

The goal of this exercise is to illustrate the different activities you do daily and the time you spend on them, thus increasing your awareness of your use of time on a daily basis and highlighting the role of time as a resource. Track your time use for the next 7 days and record what you have done on the table below. You can find different options under which you can log the categories that you've used your time for. You can log your time use in small bits, for instance daily, and then press "Save changes" and return to it later on. This forms the basis to then reflect on your time use. Although this task can feel a little bit demanding, it provides an important basis for the rest of the modules. Previous participants on this module have found that the exercise was helpful in recognizing areas for improvement in their time management and tackling their tasks at work. In a 3-month follow-up of the course, some felt that the most notable impacts from the course had come from learning about their own time management.

Before starting to track your time, how satisfied do you currently feel with your work/life/leisure/sleep balance? How well do you think you balance your time between these areas?

 

After you've tracked your time use, it is now useful to take a closer look at how you spend your time:

What differences did you notice in your work/life/leisure/sleep balance? What kind of thoughts arose? (e.g., Was your free time restorative? How did you spend your free time? How did your workload feel?)

What differences did you observe between your perceived and actual time use? Did anything about your time use surprise you?

Reflect on your feelings for each day. What observations did you make?

What changes would you like to make in your time management? What small, concrete adjustments could you incorporate into your time use?