Personal Time Management a Priority

In the course of my daily life, I find myself needing to reconcile three often opposing forces: daily routines, non-routine "things to get done", and special events. Routines are those activities that are either basic to my daily health and maintenance or are interests, the nature of which lend themselves to incremental improvement over day-to-day practice. In the latter category I place daily activities like running, foreign language study, reading, and writing (hence this blog).   An extension of this  category are activities done on a weekly basis, like attending church, small group meetings, or mowing the lawn. "Things to get done" are the items that, given any particular day, are peculiar to that day but taken together figure into my life maintenance.  Examples of this are doctor/dentist appointments and having my house re-roofed (which will actually occur on Wednesday).  The third category, special events, is similar to the second but tend to take up great parts of a day...or even several days.  Going on trips with the family, or travel of any kind for that matter, belong to this type. Since all three forces place demands on my already-scarce time or confine me to a place when I want to be somewhere else, they tend to arise at each other's expense.  Being more or less a creature of routine, I have thus a tendency to experience anxiety when events lend themselves to crowding out those daily routines that I want realized. Part of the efforts of "self-improvement" that I am engaging in now involve both managing my own time in order to accommodate, to a realistic but optimal degree, those daily routines which I value while effectively negotiating the often stressful (to me) torrent of punctuated or special time-consuming events that tend to arise around all of us to varying degrees.  I am not one of those people who will ever make the complaint "I am bored"....I frankly don't understand people who allow themselves to feel that way, much less express the sentiment to me as if I am somehow responsible for making their life more interesting.  There is so much around me that is interesting...I simply do not have the time to cover it all!

To deal with these three aspects of personal time management, I need three tools...they can either be in "paper" or computer form or internalized within my head...but they all require some advance planning at the start of the day:  (1) A calendar which I can fill in and refer to regarding special events, "things-to-do", and weekly activities, (2) a list of things that I want to accomplish each day, prioritized by the importance and urgency of the activities, and ultimately (3) a time map of each day, with hourly blocks filled in by planned activities, based on what is on (1) and (2).  It is (3) that I can then carry around with me to guide me through a day and ensure that much, if not all of I want to do gets done...and with as little anxiety as possible in the process.

Advance planning of my day's activities may seem at first to be a bit cumbersome, but like other things if made into a timely, daily habit then it will come naturally to me.  And this is what I am currently dealing with now...