This practice offers a sense of control over one's time and allows for personal decision-making. Most importantly, it grants time for reflection before tending to others' demands.

Setup a recurring Zoom meeting for set times every week where you guarantee to be present. As much as possible, when people send you an ambiguous request or initiate a conversation that will require a lot of back and forth, point them toward your office hours schedule and tell them to stop by next time they can to discuss. It’s a simple idea, but it can reduce the number of attention-snagging back-and-forth electronic messages in your professional life by an order of magnitude.

What if you miss a deadline? Follow the rule for what to do if you fall off a horse: get right back on. Make a new, easy, realistic deadline, and get back to work. Don’t waste time crying over lost opportunities, take advantage of new ones.

ere are some useful questions to ask yourself about the pace and timing of your dissertation work: _____ Are you moving forward? Do you sometimes feel as if you’re going in circles? Do you know when? why? _____ Is your pace accelerating? decelerating? If it’s steady, does it feel like the right pace? _____ What speeds you up? What slows you down? _____ Is your pace one that you can maintain over time? _____ Is it a pace that will allow you to finish on time? _____ Are you undoing as much writing as you’re producing? If so, why? _____ Do you know roughly how much you can write in a certain period of time? _____ Have you thought about, and discussed with your advisor, how large your project must be, how small it can be and still be acceptable, and how long you have? That is, have you calibrated the process? _____ Have you made a tentative timetable?

Because Autofocus doesn’t rely on dates, it’s essential to combine it with a calendar system so you can account for time-sensitive tasks like appointments and turning in forms at certain deadlines.

You’re giving your time a job as opposed to asking in the moment, “What should I do next?”

Now, everyone who works has some sort of time management system they’re using. If you don’t know what it’s called, if you can’t tell me the details of it, if you’ve never thought about that, it’s just a really bad one probably, but you still have one. One way or the other, you’re making these decisions. The question is just how do we want to make these decisions? What is going to work better?

I’m going to define time management to be whatever philosophy, process, systems, or rules that you deploy to make decisions about what you’re going to do right now with your time.

That’s not to mention the Stock-Sanford corollary to Parkinson’s law: “If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.”

Mason Currey’s book “Daily Rituals: Women at Work.” It gives cheerful summaries about how some of the most prolific, successful artists managed their time.

The first rule in time management is to ruthlessly protect your time.

. Three points may be proposed about task-orientation. First, there is a sense in which it is more humanly comprehensible than timed labour. The peasant or labourer appears to attend upon what is an observed necessity. Second, a community in which task-orientation is common appears to show least demarcation between "work" and "life". Social intercourse and labour are intermingled - the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task - and there is no great sense of conflict between labour and "passing the time of day". Third, to men accustomed to labour timed by the clock, this attitude to labour appears to be wasteful and lacking in urgency.1

Stay engaged. As mentioned above, you are expected to check your GVSU email twice daily, read new posts on CampusWire twice daily, contribute to the discussion board daily, and make at least two significant contributions to CampusWire per week. Make daily engagement with the course a habit, and don’t take days off (unless it’s a weekend and you have all your work done).

Budget your time. MTH 124 is a 5-credit course with no meetings, so you will need to plan on spending about 15-20 hours per week doing mindful work. That’s 3-4 hours per weekday if you choose not to work on weekends. If you are taking other courses or have job of family responsibilities, you’ll need to think about where to put these hours in your daily and weekly schedules. In my experience, the #1 reason students don’t succeed in online courses is overcommitment and not managing time well.

The same is true with my time. So I started blocking all 24 hours of my time (mental breaks, yoga workouts, prepping dinner, sleep, everything) into my digital calendar. There is no time unaccounted for. 

If you don't control your schedule, it will control you.

I have a theory that time scarcity is also linked to something I'll call time scatteredness. This happens when you really have no idea how long it takes us to complete tasks, and this skews how much time you think you have or need.

it’s a wise idea to begin tracking your time in order to get a more realistic handle on how long specific projects and tasks take you. That’ll override your optimism bias and keep your expectations for your own productivity in check.

Pushing a deadline back once is one thing. Needing to do it over and over again will make it appear as if you don’t know how to manage your own workload.

GTD strategies

I could get a lot more done in an 8-9 hour day with a PC and a desk phone than I get done now in a 9-10 hour day with a laptop /tablet / smartphone, which should allow me to be more a lot more productive but just interrupt me. I don't want the mobile flexibility to work anywhere. It sucked in management roles doing a full day then having dinner with friends and family then getting back to unfinished calls and mails. I much prefer to work later then switch off totally at home.

I've helped over a million people be more intentional about their time.

It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover who have yet to essay it. To “clear” even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits. And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary. And it is because I know the difficulty, it is because I know the almost disastrous effect of failure in such an enterprise, that I earnestly advise a very humble beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one’s self-respect. Hence I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously.

What I suggest is that at six o’clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., “Time to be thinking about going to bed.” The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.