A couple of years ago, when I was graduating from university, I struggled a lot with completing my work on time. My scientific supervisor, who was basically the Gordon Ramsey of my faculty (competent af, but the amount of pressure she put on you was indescribable), didn't make it any easier for me. I was stressed out 24/7 for a whole year.
The worst times were, of course, the days before deadlines. I was supposed to finish yet another chapter of my thesis and complete a hundred tasks and projects for my lectures and seminars.
I have a problem with concentrating on anything for longer than 10 minutes (which may be undiagnosed ADHD, a weird side-effect of my antidepressants, or something else - I don't know), so I have to be creative when it comes to time management. I have two time management tools that I created or adapted for myself. One of them is for when I have tons of work and several days to do it all, and the other is for desperate situations when I have only one day to complete everything.
Here I'll tell you about the first one, which is my favourite: it only requires a pen and a single stick-note (or any piece of paper, really, and it can also be adapted for excel and I’ll show you both variations). Here’s how it goes:
There is a certain number of tasks that you need to do - each one takes a different amount of time and is generally different in complexity.
I usually spend some time figuring out how complicated and time-consuming each one actually is and give them a score from 1 to 10 (or 1 to 5, it depends)
Then there is the number of days I have for these tasks: I subtract one for either rest or (more often) in case I don't manage to do enough in any of the days.
I divide the sum of points I assigned to my tasks by the remaining days and voila - I have a quantitative measure that I need to achieve every day to be certain that I can do everything I planned in time.
It's great if I manage to do more, of course, but overall, when I reach the required number, I can be sure that on the last day I won't have so much work that I won't be able to afford to take a break.
Plus, relatively large and complex tasks can be performed step-by-step without worrying that I have been working on one thing for too long without crossing anything off the list. For example, I might not have finished a chapter but I’ve done enough to give myself 4 points out of 6.
Here’s how my stick-notes looked like:
And this is my excel version of the method:
(don't mind cyrillic writing, these are mostly just disciplines I needed to know for my finals)
I hope it'll be useful for some of you. I'll make a post about my second-best time management tool sometime later.
