October’s Theme: Time Management

By Gwynne Monahan

It seems fitting that time management is the topic this month. Every time I alloted to sit down and write this post has been interrupted. Time seems to be managing me lately more than I am managing it.

That didn’t used to be the case. My time used to be quite structured.

I held a regular job, with the day finishing at 5 or 6pm. Work rarely, if ever, followed me home. In 2007 and 2008, while working full time, I decided to go to graduate school part time and get a masters degree. So when the work day ended, I was either in class, or in my apartment or the library, reading case law and writing papers. And in 2008, a full time job and part time graduate program weren’t enough for me. I needed to take an HTML class at a community college, too.

Structured. There were set tasks at work. Set tasks for class. Time practically managed itself.

It was a different story in 2009. I found myself working three different jobs that all required attention during the regular business day, and sometimes after hours as well. I had to manage a team of content migrators, be the middle man between developers and the client, write out posting procedures and move content myself on one project, develop lesson plans, teach, grade papers and exams for an undergraduate course in technical communication and, some where between all of that, research and draft blog posts. And there was a new wrinkle: tracking and billing for time. That, too, takes time.

This idea of time management really hit home then.

There was no definitive start and stop to my day, and the structure I took for granted crumbled. It took a little while for the dust to settle, and when it did, I found the key to time management for me: setting priorities.

My first priority every day is running. I get up in the morning and go for a run. It clears my head, gets the endorphins pumping and I’m ready to tackle the priorities set for the rest of the day. The range of priorities is wide. Conference calls. Interviews. Client meetings. Project deadlines. Social media. Billing. Writing. Networking events. Reading and research. Family time. Jeopardy or some other kind of downtime.

Every thing I do fits a priority spot in the day, and when I adhere to the priority list of the day, time again manages itself. Oddly enough, setting my own priorities to manage my time works better for me than I thought it would. There’s a structure in place again, and the difference is its flexibility. Whatever happens next, my time management structure will be able to flex and adapt.

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