Getting the Slack out of the Line… er… make that “Clock”.

As a recovering underachiever, one area that I’ve recognized as a weakness is time management. I’ve never been good about managing my time. I address the big blocks and then work in the medium and small blocks wherever they seem to fit in. I waste a lot of time watching TV, surfing the Internet, fiddling around with my guitars and just being generally lazy. This has to stop.

Time to schedule my life. Get the immoveable objects on there first, then the things I need to do that don’t require a hard and fast time, and lastly, schedule the decompression time.

As I progress, I’m going to do a better job outlining the things I want to learn & do, then allocate blocks of time to achieve those goals.

I found a couple of sites that you may want to look at if you’ve discovered you have time management issues:

1. 10 Tips for Time Management. Definitely some things here I ought to incorporate into my plan.

2. Lifehack. I had a student of mine, Noel, recommend this site to me, and wow, there’s alot of good stuff on this site. Note to self: allocate more time to read Lifehack articles….

3. Mark McGuinness has a free e-book entitled Time Management for Creative People.  Yeah, I’m technical, but I’d like to think of myself as being a “creative problem solver”. There’s some good stuff in here for folks that are open-minded about how to apply Mark’s suggestions, even if you’d rather work in a flow-chart based world.

4.  Here’s a few simple guidelines to follow from the Productivity 501 website. Check the link at the bottom of the blog entry for additional Time Management tips on the same site.

5. Lastly, one thing that everybody ought to see one time is Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”.  On Randy’s homepage, you’ll find a video lecture on Time Management that he gave at the University of Virginia.  Randy recently died of pancreatic cancer, but he knew it was going to happen. He only had so much time, and so much to do before his passing. If anybody ever had to take a crash-course in time management, it was Professor Pausch. I highly recommend all of his video’s, and a box of kleenex.

One thing that I haven’t shared with folks here. I appreciate the finite nature of the time we have on this plane of existence. I’ve had several experiences in my life that have given me pause to consider life and death. We only have so much time, gang. I don’t know about you, but I need to do a better job making each second count. I turn 45 in a couple of weeks, and I might be halfway through, I also may have considerably less time, or some crazy medical breakthrough might allow me to do a biological reset that allows me to live for a couple hundred years in a 33 year old container.

Make the seconds count. It doesn’t take much time at all to tell somebody you love them.