Thursday, December 28, 2006

It's About Time

My first blog. It's about time. Pun intended; this post really is about time and time management.
I kept avoiding blogging, with one thing on my mind: if you have time for blogging, then you're missing out on something else. Which is true. After all, everything you do comes in favor of something else you don't do with it. In fact, this is life, and in my view - the biggest challenge of life is time management.
This challenge is at its best for me now, as I'm trying to maneuver between studying in college, working part time and founding a startup. In practice, I do all of this mostly from home, which doesn't make it simpler, but rather makes it more difficult.
We all know the saying "24 hours a day is just not enough" (or 25 hours if you get up earlier), but truth is - it's more than enough. My view of life is that you don't have 24 hours a day, but rather a lifetime. It's just how you divide what you do by years, months, days and hours.
I have some basic rules with managing my time:
  1. Sleep 6 hours a day. Some say it's not enough. 7.5 hours is also acceptable, but it has to be a multiple of 1.5 - the sleeping cycle - so you don't wake up in the middle of deep sleeping.
  2. Work 10-12 hours a day
  3. Sport activity: at least 3 hours a week, including aerobic activity.
  4. 3 hours a day for leisure
  5. Don't work on Saturdays

Also, there are some guidelines:

  1. If you don't have the energies to do something: that's the thing you must do now. This is based on the fact that the things we don't like doing but have to be done, tend to be postponed forever, and lower our life (or work) quality.
  2. Leisure is all about doing things, not doing nothing. Doing nothing is ok as long as it's not your hobby.
  3. Lesiure is also about spending time with your family and friends.

It's not too hard to make such a list. Adhering to it is the real challenge.


Having said all of the above: it's all irrelevant when you're working on a new startup :-)



Have a wonderful 2007,

Boaz.





2 comments:

Unknown said...

One of the only time management books I found useful is: "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity" by David Allan. It's staightforward, not Zen-like approach to, well - getting things done.

Anonymous said...

I believe that ppl have become so aware of time management that it created a new problem - TM OCD.

"burn calendar, burn"