Organizing my time better

[grl]

Good evening, this my first post on this forum, although I have been reading the website for some months. I was wanting some advice / suggestions / experience of others on how I can better organize my time. I am a masters student writing a thesis, so do not attend class as such and my time is mine as I see fit to use it - this can lead to a lack of stucture during the day. I feel that I could achieve more during the day if I organized my time better. How do people organize their days, how detailed are peoples daily plans and do they help? I am wary of being too fixed as a lot of the work I do I have no idea how long it will take for example researcing a particular point one article will lead into another. If I had a schedule for each day so that I didn't have to think a great deal about "what am I going to do next" I feel I would get more done. Any comments would be very much appreciated

[Sunnybayes]

Dude, you are a "masters student writing a thesis"
You already know "how I can better organize my time".
You said yourself that you've "been reading the website for some months"
Then obviously you've read Steve's articles on time management, and you could probably write your own book on how to structure your time. And there's probably at least a 1000 books on time management...

THE THINGS IS, it's just more about setting up the habit of doing this daily.
Do a 30 day trial on just spending an hour each day of planning out your day, and planning out your long term goals.
Seriously, you've read enough information about time management, now you just need to setup the subconscious daily habit of actually doing it.

good luck


Planning is hard. It takes lots effort. Why? Because you have to spend so much concious energy on rewiring your brain to break your subconscious habits of the stuff that you'd usually do. So after you put in the concious effort of making the plan, [reprogramming your subconscious mind] then you can let your subconscious computer go on autopilot and make it feel like you dont have to put in any effort. Just the same as learning any skill, or setting up any habit, or breaking old habits... its hard at first because you have to expend energy to rewire yourself, but once you've programmed your subconscious hardware, then its automatic. So spend the energy of setting up your habit of planning daily, then it will be automatic after that.

But the paradox is, if you plan, then you are going to make lots of progress, so your situation is always going to change, so you are always going to have to make new plans, and its always going to requite effort to do.

And that it implies that if planning ever becomes easy, then that means your subconscious can handle everything, and that you've reached some kind of steady state at some level. You need some kind of stability so you are not stressed, but need to push yourself enough so that you're always making progress if you wish.


Also, planning is more about making sure you do the right thing. As steve says from here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...me-management/

Recently, however, I’ve been taking a more strategic approach to time management, meaning that I’m more concerned with making correct decisions than with optimizing the specific implementation details. This article takes a fresh look at time management from this strategic perspective.

Time management systems like David Allen’s GTD, Tony Robbins’ OPM, or Franklin-Covey’s system require that you prioritize your tasks in some way, and this means you need to label some tasks as more important than others. But exactly how do you determine which task is the most important one? What’s the criteria? I believe the key factor in effective time management is accuracy. When you have an accurate model of reality, then the difference between the important and the unimportant becomes clear in a meaningful sense.

The real gains in time management are realized at the top, not the bottom. If your high-level strategic decisions are based on an inaccurate understanding of reality, then your mission, goals, projects, and actions will be virtually meaningless in the grand scheme of things. All of your accomplishments will be little more than busywork. This article presents a way to resolve this situation and to know whether or not you’re setting the right goals to begin with.