Day 6 - Time Management

I rendered the faces of more bald-men today.

I've come to the conclusion that I have time-management issues— Still not waking up on time every day, and tasks take more/less time than planned.
3 PMs have been arriving without enough hours to put the work into.

This must be an issue most people who work (or keep themselves busy) from home have to deal with at some point.

So today I googled  "motivating yourself to stick to your schedule", and found Celestine Chua's post:

6 Proven Ways To Make New Habits Stick

Sold at "Proven". 

And to my surprise, Chua addresses the "wake up on time" dilemma in her very first step. I knew this issue was not to be underestimated!

Chua's advice is to get to the root of the problem by questioning yourself as you would a 6 year old. I don't have any better ideas, so let's go.

• Why didn't you wake up on time? I feel like crap every morning.
   
• What's making you feel that way dear? I slept too little.
   
• Because? It's hard to go to sleep at night.
   
• Why? Sometimes it's just the inability to sleep. I can't seem to turn my brain off. In most cases, however, I just feel anxious every evening. I don't want the day to end.
   
• Why would that make you feel anxious? I don't know. Going to sleep means I can't keep on spending time with my husband or friends, and it means that I have to stop doing things.
   
•  Aren't you spending enough time doing things (with others or by yourself)? I do, but I feel anxious whenever that has to stop.
   
• Gosh.. well.. I'm not a psychologist to have an answer (or question) for that!

I never really thought of it before though. Is "knowing" going to help when it's time to go to bed tonight? (even though I don't have a solution). In Chua's case, she simply had too many tasks to do and not enough time to complete them. In mine, it's a weird psychological abnormality of some sort. 

Would it help if I tell myself there will be more time to do things tomorrow? (that's what I would tell a 6 year old).
Chua on the other hand came to a different conclusion:

Getting down to this root cause helped me realize two things (1) All our habits are tied to one another (sleeping time, waking time, timeliness) (2) I underestimate the time taken to finish the tasks (and subsequently overestimate how fast I can do those tasks).

While her conclusion won't help dispose of my fear of doing nothing, it does address the second issue I mentioned— Tasks taking more/less time than planned.

In step #3, Chua explains how she does things.

 1  Batch tasks into (a) Major projects, (b) Medium sized tasks and (c) Small, administrative activities

2  Slot them into my schedule for the day. Major projects would have most amount of time assigned. The principle I usually go by is 60-30-10 (% time spent) for a-b-c groups respectively.

3  Be aware of how much time each task requires. If it helps, most of the time we underestimate the time we need. Make it a realistic yet challenging time to work towards. Usually I assign a 5-10 minutes buffer time in between tasks to account for the transition from 1 task to the next.

4  Assign exact timings for when each task starts and ends. For example, 9am to 10:30am for Project A, 12:30-1:30pm for lunch, 6:30-7:30pm for commute.

5  If there are more tasks to be done than my schedule allows, I’ll deprioritize the unimportant ones and put them off to another day. 

So starting tomorrow, I will no longer be re-using that one list I composed in day 1. I'll be writing a new list first thing every morning (before sketching / research).

I will also be putting more thought into timing my tasks.

Thank you Celestine Chua for sharing these tips.