I’m no fan of time. It is a relent­less, immov­able force, destroy­ing plans, induc­ing stress, and bring­ing unpre­dictable change to our del­i­cate expec­ta­tions of con­sis­tency. But I’m slowly real­iz­ing that of all of my schol­arly respon­si­bil­i­ties, time is the one con­stant, the ever present sub­ject. Teach­ing is design­ing pace and order of con­tent. Research is pre­dict­ing and invent­ing the future based on all that has passed. And doing both of these well requires me to care­fully sequence my thought and actions to best lever­age what lit­tle time I have. To man­age my time.

I don’t feel like an expert at this. But peo­ple often com­ment on my abil­ity to man­age time well, and I’m always struck at people’s inabil­ity to under­stand where their time goes. What am I see­ing that oth­ers can’t? What am I doing to con­trol time?

After think­ing about it a bit, I think it boils down to three basic skills. First, I’ve always been able to pri­or­i­tize. That might sound sim­ple, but it’s an astound­ing act to take the thou­sands of things one cares about and rank them. This is because there’s noth­ing inher­ently ordered about the things one cares about. The laun­dry isn’t inher­ently less impor­tant than writ­ing a lec­ture if all my clothes are soiled. Know­ing how to pri­or­i­tize and con­stantly repri­or­i­tize as sit­u­a­tions change needs to be a con­scious, explicit act, if one hopes to influ­ence the future. Oth­er­wise, the for­ward thrust of time will always dom­i­nate and dic­tate what’s important.

But know­ing what’s impor­tant isn’t enough. Being able to artic­u­late what’s impor­tant, and define what that means, is impor­tant as well. For instance, my aller­gies have been both­er­ing me a lot lately and I’ve wanted them to bother me less. But there are a lot of ways to artic­u­late that goal, some more use­ful and action­able than oth­ers. For exam­ple, when I say, “bother me less,” I have to be very care­ful to know what I mean by “bother” and “less.” Do I want to get off allergy pills? Do I want to buy less facial tis­sue? Do I want fewer sinus headaches? These are all dif­fer­ent goals and I might do dif­fer­ent things to accom­plish each. They also might improve my life in dif­fer­ent ways. It’s not until I start giv­ing mean­ing to verbs and adjec­tives in my goals that I can start to eval­u­ate what’s really impor­tant to me.

Finally, a clearly artic­u­lated goal isn’t enough to accom­plish it. A third skill is being able to take a well artic­u­lated goal and care­fully break it down into smaller goals. For exam­ple, if I decide I want fewer sinus headaches, I need to find out what causes sinus headaches and see what causes I have con­trol over in my life. This might lead to sev­eral new activ­i­ties and goals, such as drink­ing more flu­ids. How can I drink more flu­ids? Maybe I need a water bot­tle. What’s a good water bot­tle? And so on. With­out break­ing down the future into man­age­able parts, it would be quite dif­fi­cult to find a moment where progress seems action­able. Big goals only lead us to imag­ine big, unwieldy futures. A good small goal is some­thing you can imag­ine get­ting done in an hour.

So how does one get good at these things? Prac­tice is prob­a­bly the best approach. Hav­ing accom­plished a goal before makes it a lot eas­ier to know how to break down the goal into smaller goals, with con­fi­dence. It also gives one prac­tice at artic­u­lat­ing goals. Another trick I like to use is to write to do items about to do items, such as “break down the goal of reduc­ing sinus headaches”. That way, the first and most impor­tant step of accom­plish the goal becomes a legit­i­mate step in a process, and some­thing that I can accom­plish in 20 minutes.

Tools can help with all of this, but most are just glo­ri­fied lists. Most of the impor­tant parts of man­ag­ing time come with discipline.