A
s someone who does a lot of varied things, and tries to improve at them, I've attempted a few different time-management systems. Even thinking about time management too closely always feels a little gross, as time just seems both too precious and too intimate to respond well to rigorous scheduling and planning. I've had time periods where I did do a lot of hour-to-hour planning, and I actually enjoyed it and got a lot done, but it didn't seem to last very long; in particular, specific planning doesn't feel very good when you have a family to spend time with and look after. It's one thing to plan out your working hours, but building a non-reactive schedule just doesn't work when your wife needs spontaneous help with something, or your son needs to be danced around and held for a while to calm him down. These "interruptions" can completely derail a highly specific schedule, and send it frequently back to the drawing board.
Furthermore, I get a lot of pleasure from spontaneously choosing my actions during the day. I need to spend some time in prayer discerning whether this is a fruitful and good aspect of my personality, or a distracting and self-serving aspect, but it colors a lot of the way that I think about time. A good day for me is one in which I follow my whims throughout the whole day, but still feel productive. Is there a way to balance the two consistently?
Anyway, this is all to say I thought of a time-management experiment. Basically, instead of planning things hour-by-hour for the week, you make a list of things you'd like to accomplish, along with all the normal things that you enjoy, and that make up your life. Each thing goes on an index card, forming your "deck" for the week (it's very important that you should make a duplicate card for the number of times you're planning on doing the thing). Whenever you do basically anything, you pull the card out of the deck and stick it in the "discard pile", and you can only do things that are still left in your deck.
The idea is that you have to get around to everything eventually, but there's still a great deal of room for spontaneous choice and following your desires. Obviously, you can play the deck wrong and just do all the fun stuff at the beginning, and leave all the hard things for the end of the week, but habituating yourself to thinking ahead and doing some difficult things while you still have the energy feels alright to me. Obviously, this would work as essentially a to-do list as well -- what I'm getting at is that the list should be relatively all-encompassing, not just a list of chores or tasks. The idea is more there to handle things like lots of hobbies and interests, rather than a way to consistently accomplish your backlog of tasks. Anyway, maybe I'll try it. Maybe it turns out it's just a glorified to-do list.