I have always been horrible with my time. I either appeared late to all kind of appointments (school, uni, assignments, trains - well you get the idea), mixed them up, "double booked" or forgot about them at all. I tried really hard to improve in this aspect of my life aswell but only made minimal progress.

The reason is as simple as obvious: I never actually learned and used a system. Trying to memorize every single task and its due date is impossible. Even worse if you`re a lazy fuck like me you will postpone 90% of your task and at some point you will crumble under the sheer "pressure" of your to-do list. I started using a calendar and putt every little thing in there, and it has helped me a lot in several aspects:

  • I) I give tasks and appointments a time when I do them. I don't postpone them. I don't spent ages on them. It helped me realize just how precious my time is. They keyword is efficiency.

  • II) By structuring and organizing my day I get twice as much done, it feels like I have 20% more free time and at the end of the day I feel obviously great because I achieved x,y,z.

  • III) I can only truly relax if my subconscious doesn't always reminds me of all the shit I have to do. I don't feel stressed anymore even on sheer endless days because I feel happy about being productive. I have one task to focus on. If I study, I fucking study. When I go lifting, I lift. It helped me living in the moment way more than meditating (they are complementary of course). Don't endure, rather enjoy and achieve maximum results.

Not-To-do-List: Write down some time-killer and avoid them. Facebook or Reddit for example. I spent 80% less time on the internet now since 01.01.15 and this two tools really helped me.

1) StayFocusd: Prevents you from visiting certain websites after a certain amount of time or before a specific time of day.

2) timeStats: Shows you exactly how much time you spent on which sites and statistics like your daily/weekly/monthly average time. This really opened my eyes, because I underestimated the time I spent online completely.

Eisenhower-Matrix: Create a matrix with 2 rows and 2 columns. [Urgent; Not-Urgent] X [Important; Not-Important]. Put your tasks in one of the those 4 areas and handle them accordingly.

Hopefully you find some useful information in here to apply on your life. If not then I'm really sorry I just wasted your time...

edit: format