Time management and the ubiquity of screens

Hello! A short post on something I've been thinking about recently - time management. I can't imagine this being a huge problem for me in the near future, with my course and all my other activities rapidly advancing, and I guess it's ironic that I've only formulated this theory now, at the end of a large stretch of free time. But enough mental wandering!

I'm beginning to realize that for me, the key to being productive is knowing what I'm going to do next. This doesn't mean planning out my day with any rigidity or regularity necessarily (although in practice my weekly schedule is both of these things for good reasons). It simply means having a clear goal in mind throughout the day, with simple 'downtime' or 'thinking' being a perfectly valid goal. One large category of my daily tasks that doesn't constitute a valid goal is procastination - for me, this means going on my laptop with no clear idea of what I want to achieve, and usually watching something on iPlayer, reading BBC News or the Guardian, or even (and this I do a lot!) playing Tetris while I think. I feel a lot more refreshed when I don't do so much of all of these activities, and out of everything I do I think they represent the most harm sustained to my productivity.

So, my simple solution to manage my time more effectively (which I will try to implement henceforth!) is to not pick up my laptop *unless* I have a valid goal in mind. Although the way in which I defined 'valid goal' above may seem incomplete, it doesn't present a problem in practice, perhaps because I have arbitrary views on what is and isn't procastination. There are plenty of activities which I consider 'valid goals' e.g. walking and thinking, talking/catching up with friends, writing a blog post, writing in my diary, which plenty of people would consider procastination. For me, these all represent either mental downtime or an activity which gets me thinking creatively, whereas the aimless reception of online media is different because it doesn't really put any demands on my faculties unless I really concentrate. I'm hoping that leaving my traditional procastination techniques behind me will free up a load of time I didn't realize I had, and in addition to allowing me to accomplish more in a day, this might even leave my life more leisurely than I would have experienced it otherwise.

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