Evaluating Time Use

What is evaluating time use?

This is an exercise to determine exactly what you do with your time and how you can make your life better by rescheduling your time.

The exercise begins with creating a chart or a record of how you spend your time over a typical day or over a typical week.   Remember some of the activities you perform are necessary, while others can be rescheduled or delegated to some other point of time in the week.  No activity is unnecessary.  So do not begin the exercise with a feeling of guilt. Time spent reading a book or watching television or even chatting with your friends is essential and must be factored into your chart.  So are you ready to begin?

This is what we do.  We will create a table that will help us record information about what we do through a typical day for a week. To determine percentage of time spent on an activity, divide the number of hours in an activity by 168.  This will give you the percentage of time you spend on each of the activities.

Now we shall prioritize on the activities and evaluate whether we want to be doing that activity for so much time in a day. 

High level evaluation of activities.

During this process, we will consciously consider which of the activities we can give up or how much time we can reschedule.  Work on the principle that we do all the activities because we feel the need to perform the activity, but we must be realistic in the amount of time we allocate to the activity.

1. I spend __________% of my time on activity x.
2. What is the importance of this activity in a scale of 1-5 to me?
3. What is the priority ranking that I will assign to this activity?
4. Do I really need to do this activity daily?  Can I reschedule it to once or twice a week or to a different time of the day? 
5. Can I reduce the number of hours spent on this activity?
6. Will I be emotionally or psychologically deprived if I do not perform this activity daily for a given number of hours?

Once you have answered these questions, you will understand how important that activity is for your emotional or psychological well being.  If you feel it is essential, it must be undertaken at the frequency you feel it is required. Schedule the activity into your chart with a clear understanding of your need.

Now let us drill down into the granular details of the activities we do.

Granular Level Activity Evaluation:

Look at the time spent on study.  How much of the time you spend on study is actually spent on study and how much of it is spent on preparing to study?  If you spend more time preparing to study than actually studying you are identifying a problem!   So, having identified the problem, go the root cause of the problem and find a solution for it!

1. Perhaps you are not very alert at the time of the day you allot to study and hence are forced to tune yourself to study.  Solution: Is it possible to reschedule the time to some other part of the day when you are more alert? 

2. It is also possible that you are setting yourself unrealistic goals and are not able to achieve your goals, so you are spending time trying to reschedule work. Solution: Set realistic goals and time frames for achieving the goals. 
   

3. It is also possible that you are not studying in one place daily.  So you need to move your study material round the house and that is taking up your time. Solution: Study in one place daily and keep your books and stationary ready for your next session at the end of every session.

4. Another distracting factor that could be traced back to the symptom—excessive preparation time is that you do not like the subject you are studying or the topics you are studying are too difficult. Solution: So you begin with the difficult subject and then put it aside for more interesting or easy subjects.  It would be a good idea to put the most difficult subject first in your study schedule and work on it for a fixed time daily or weekly. Similar study time scheduling should be done for all subjects that you need to study and you must stick to your schedule.
   

Once you have the above problem sorted out, you must move on to the next stage of evaluation.  What is the objective of the study?  What should I be able to do at the end of the learning phase?  Note down the goal and then begin your study. Check the outcomes at the end of the study period!

You could also try the principle of “Twofer”.  You could take your study material with you when you are traveling so that you can study while you are being transported to your destination.

Conclusion:

The exercise that you have been doing is nothing but a time management exercise.  You are actually implementing the principles of activity and time management:

1. Optimizing time frames by identifying best time for study
2. Tackling difficult problems first by identifying subjects you find difficult or have little interest in.
3. Using distributed learning practices by creating study blocks for different subjects
4. Creating conducive environments for study by studying in the same place everyday.
5. Ensuring that your emotional psychological needs are attended to by making time for other activities.
6. Ensuring that your personal needs are attended to by making time for sleeping, eating and socializing.
7. Using the principle of "Twofer"--performing two activities simultaneously.