Learning & Mind · Foundation

Time Management

Most time management teaches you to fit more in. This course starts from the opposite premise: the hours are fixed, the list is not, and the skill is deciding. It covers how to find out where your time really goes rather than where you think it goes, why estimates run short in a way that is measurable and predictable, what the evidence does and does not show about planning, about deciding what not to do, and about how a working day is actually broken up, and how to build a week that survives contact with other people. It is the last course in the first term of the Core, after the ones that teach you how to learn, read, write, think and use a machine, because it is the course that decides when you will do any of it.

What you'll learn

• Record a week of your own time against an estimate written first, and say where the two disagreed and by how much
• Tell the hours you control from the hours you do not, and count how many discretionary hours your week actually contains
• State what has been measured about why estimates of your own work run short, and why being told to be pessimistic and being told to remember both fail to fix it
• Write an if-then plan for a goal you hold, name the cue it turns on, and say what the evidence for it does and does not establish
• State what a field study measured about how long people work before switching, and say what the measured cost of an interruption is and is not
• Decide in writing not to do something, with what it costs named, and do the same for a week you have little discretion over
• Build a week that names its fixed points first, run it, and record where it broke
• Sort a piece of time-management advice into measurable, unmeasurable or false, and trace a repeated figure to its source or establish that nobody can produce one