time management skills

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what are time management skills? i'm increasingly aware that i don't have them - half days vanish without me knowing quite how - but i'm not quite sure what to do about this. are time management skills courses worth taking? i've been offered them through work many times, but have tended to dismiss them as, err, a waste of time...

― toby (tsg20), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 09:54 (twenty years ago)

I turned up late to my time management training course, hahaha

― tissp! (the impossible shortest specia), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 09:58 (twenty years ago)

what are time management skills? i'm increasingly aware that i don't have them - half days vanish without me knowing quite how - but i'm not quite sure what to do about this

GET OFF THE INTERNET!

― ken c (ken c), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 10:11 (twenty years ago)

I was sent on a course by my employer (the British Government) to improve my time management skills. It didn't help.

The issue, apparently, is to organise your environment in such a way that thing which would eat up your time are avoided as are unnecessary actions. This would appear to involve a fair amount of planning and preparation.

Unfortunately I'm both badly organised and lazy and only manage to get away with stuff by thinking on my feet. A least I got a day or two away from my desk...

― Stone Monkey (Stone Monkey), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 10:19 (twenty years ago)

In fairness, a lot of the skillz they teach are actually useful, the only problem as far as I can see is the paradox of needing to actually be someone organised and time-efficient enough in order to implement the techinques, which of course if you are, then you don't need the techniques anyway.

― tissp! (the impossible shortest specia), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 10:20 (twenty years ago)

I find the one thing that helps me the most is the classic list: before you leave each evening, make a list of things you need to do tomorrow. When you come back into work, it's much easier to pick up where you left off.

I also find that this means you can relax more upon leaving work, as you've wrestled the beast under control, so to speak. There's also the well-publicised side effect of your brain actively working on the things you write down whilst you relax in the evening/sleep, for the same reasons they tell exam students to read through all the questions before attempting any of them.

― tissp! (the impossible shortest specia), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 10:23 (twenty years ago)

I used to work for an insane control freak who had people doing things for her on computers all the time and didn't understand computers. She was the best time manager I ever met. Every evening before I went home I would write a status report under several headings - finished, ongoing, to do urgent, to do medium term, to do long term. Every morning I'd come in to work and she would have appended new items, changed some priorities, and checked over the finished list to make sure it was really finished. It was a slightly crazy but effective way to work and ten years later I still do it.

― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 11:12 (twenty years ago)

by planning ahead, i can now masturbate five times daily instead of just three

― Willem Veltkamp, Tuesday, 9 August 2005 11:13 (twenty years ago)

The problem is that time-management is so fundamentally boring that it removes all the excitement from work.

You need the adrenalin rush from pushing through a project at the very last minute, just to make work interesting.

― Bob Six (bobbysix), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 11:19 (twenty years ago)

You need the adrenalin rush from pushing through a project at the very last minute, just to make work interesting.

the trick is to time-manage your project so that it does finish at the very last minute!

― ken c (ken c), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 11:40 (twenty years ago)

Time management sounds kinda evil to me, it's just neo-economic Taylorism.

― jel -- (jel), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 15:15 (twenty years ago)

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