Time Management Good, Project Management Better

It is well said that life is a project and you are the manager.  We don't use such blunt language in these enlightened times, but the fact is you are not going to have a great life if you are lazy and disorganised.  Laziness is just short hand for poor time management skills and being disorganised is just another way of describing poor project management.


These are two very different things.  Time management is the skill of focusing the time for a particular day onto what you should be doing.  This skill is one that can be developed and it is one that I am working hard on right now.  I have set myself the challenge of deciding the amount of time I will spend working each day and holding myself to that number of hours for 30 consecutive days.  (6 days down if you are interested).  This is a fundamental skill on which all others depend.  It is tough.  There are many distractions all of which are very attractive.  But it is doable.

My next challenge is making sure that what I am doing is the best use of the time I can contrive.  This requires a quite different skill.  You can manage time with willpower and building good habits.  Managing projects is a more cerebral and tactical skill.  Drawing up a plan is a subtle business. And it is difficult to know if you have actually got it right when you have done.  But it is essential.  The greatest time management in the world is useless if you aren't allocating the time to the right things.

I am taking rather a meta approach to this.  I am developing a plan to get good at planning.  The first phase of this is to try and get my subconscious to do as much of the work as possible.  As part of my time management approach I allocate 30 minutes early each day - usually my 2nd or 3rd session - to planning and reviewing goals.  The first thing I do is to write out my goals.  I rarely use the same wording,  I recreate the text from scratch.  This might seem like overkill, but it is important.  Prioritising isn't easy and it helps to keep your goals in mind when you are doing.

I am still doing a lot of prioritising on the fly.  I don't ultimately want to do this but my plans aren't good enough yet to avoid it.  For now I need to keep my goals in mind, and if anything I should be giving them more attention.  And while I am well on my way to becoming a good time manager, the great goal is becoming a great project manager.


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