It is uncertain for how long you will live, today could be your last day for all you know.
Time supply is uncertain for everybody, even the richest person in the world does not know for how long they will be alive.
Today can be your last day, make the most of it.
Squeeze every hour of the day and the night, proper sleep is also an optimization of your next day, see BODY
Log what you’ve done throughout the day, use apps to measure your online activity and app usage activity.
If you have something more important to do than what they ask of you, say no. You don’t know how much time you have left.
It can be your smartphone, or whatever device you use in the future (smart glasses?), it should have a stopwatch app.
Preferably a Fitbit/Fitness tracker that also tracks steps, heartrate, caloric burn and other vitals, this relates to BODY
This is a version of the silver rule, do not do to others what you don’t want done to you.
Always calculate for unforeseen events and leave early if you can. This will reflect well on your WORK ethic.
There’s no way you’ll be able to achieve important and complex tasks in time if you don’t organize your day, week, month, trimester, year.
Planning is guessing but it’s good to have an idea of what’s coming and what time you have available to tackle things.
If you are in school and most of your time is taken by activities that only require your time as a resource I’ve found that printing the current month’s calendar on paper and then writing/amending it by hand on it works wonders to manage lots of tasks.
If you have a partner/family/employees/team, a shared online calendar like Google Calendar works well.
Master the use of checklists, prioritized checklists, daily checklists. Group similar tasks together in these checklists.
In my experience, paper checklists work better than any application.
Make sure they are realistic and notice which items stay unchecked for days, weeks, months, or years; perhaps these are projects of themselves and need to be prioritized and broken into sub-checklists.
At the end of the day long term plans are more like structured guesses. Be ready to adapt to the chaos of reality and pivot when it comes to long term goals, identify the riskier parts of your plan and try to have fall backs, a plan 'B', 'C' and know when to abort your plan before it’s too late.
Also try living days without a plan, just go out and serendipity can sometimes lead to new discoveries, but don’t make it the norm. This is a very cultural thing, you will notice how latinos are not very much into planning, but this usually leads to a lot of time wasted and missed opportunities for lack of attention to what’s coming.
Spend your time with people that have potential to grow or help you grow.
Learning to estimate how long things take you will be useful for MONEY management estimations, expenses estimation, and planning. Once again, wear a wristwatch.
I used to go as far as using a stop watch when solving calculus/physics/… problems when I prepared for an exam, then during the exam I’d write down how much time each problem took me and this would help me deal with stress knowing exactly how much time left I had to finish the test and how much it would take me to solve the rest.
Deadlines suck, but they sure as hell put pressure to get things done.
Try working on the hardest tasks first, then the rest will seem easy.
This is hard when the most important task has an indeterminate duration (you have no clue if you will be able to solve it in 5 minutes, 5 hours, or many days).
When this happens it’s usually best to first dedicate time to fully understand the problem. Remembering the previous advice of assigning time limits is useful when dedicating time to understanding or analysing a hard problem; also you can only focus for so long.
You can say, I need to do this very important task that could take me forever, I’ll assign a limited amount of fully focused time to understand it, break it into smaller easier sub-tasks, plan it, overcome it.
This is what life is about, this is what you work for, why you want to optimize your time usage, to be able to do what you love. Caveat: make sure that doing what you love doesn’t hurt you or others
Every day we need to find and use things, many are the same, our key, our wallet, our smartphones, shoes, glasses, etc.
Keeping your room/office/home organized with well defined places for specific things will make those searches not waste your time.
If you find yourself forgetting where you keep your keys, your remote control, etc, and this happens hundreds of times per year, minutes turn to hours and hours can turn to days over the years.
I’ve been keeping a "diary" ever since I was a teenager, I started blogging before blogging was a thing. I’ve documented the most important moments of my life with digital pictures and video ever since I was able to.
Our memories are unreliable and we change tremendously as persons as the years go by. We grow.
Reading myself at age 17 is mindblowing, it’s a totally different person from who I am today. Reading through those pages I find stories I have completely forgotten about and the older me can easily tell all the things that I was missing.
Nowadays the diary is a good exercise for writing once or twice a year about the achievements and life milestones lived. It’s a great way to tell if your life is moving forward, backwards, or standing still; a good reminder of living life to the fullest.
I find this to be a much better practice than the very popular new year’s resolutions people make and never follow through.
It’s useful to not just have a daily task list that you sit down to write early in the morning when you just woke up and you’re having those first sips of coffee disconnected from the internet.
Commit yourself to going through the task list by dividing your day into 30 minute slots and try to assign those tasks to different portions of the day.
You will be so productive with this habit and you will be more jealous of your time. You will also learn how much you can do in just 10 minutes.
This is both a TIME and WORK tip. Good time management helps in every other aspect of life.
I’ve only been able to work in teams of about 5 people, and in open source projects with about 100 contributors where tasks are managed by creating "tickets".
Tickets describe what needs to be done and keep track of the issue on the ticket, this works very well for distributed teams.
They can also be added to a board that groups tickets by columns representing the state of the ticket’s lifetime.