Time management: first principles from Ankur Warikoo’s workshop
3 min readAug 27, 2020
- Respect your time
If you don’t value or respect your time there’s no question of managing it. You have to believe that no matter what work situation you find yourself in, you have the first say when it comes to how your time is spent and that you are CHOOSING to spend it on a certain thing. Whenever you are presented with urgent requests for your time, ask yourself — is this worth MY time? Be frugal with attention, it is often limited in supply. - What gets measured gets done
The simple act of measurement and building evidence helps you become a better judge of how you are addressing your priorities in life — are you productive enough? are spending enough time with family? are you developing new and valuable skills? Once you start measuring, the picture becomes clear and with the right mindset, small and consistent tweaks in your time allocation helps you get closer to your desired balance.
Important to note that you shouldn’t just measure duration but also time of the day, what happened before and what happened after to get better at finding the favorable time plan for you. Recommended read: Atomic Habits - Self before work
Building on the first idea, this principle asks you to become more intentional about first nurturing yourself — meditation, exercise, reading, nourishment, etc. before you even START working on things that matter to your employer. Take advantage of the reset your brain gets after a good night’s sleep and start the day with taking care of yourself and your needs. The first few hours of the day is a good space to build the important but not urgent things that benefit from consistently showing up every day. This might mean waking up a bit earlier than you are used to (if you are a late riser) but the investment starts paying off rather quickly. Also, this automatically means not checking work mails or social media first thing in the morning because is that really putting yourself before others? - Be intentional with the non-work allocation of your time
It’s always reassuring for your mind to know exactly when it would be time to disengage with hard and difficult work and get a well deserved treat for a day’s work like watching Netflix, pursuing a hobby, playing board games with family, helping your children with their studies or just generally spending quality to recharge. Make this allocation transparent to your loved ones. Don’t try to juggle every thing every single day. Do some things less often but plan for it, commit to it. - Life happens. Don’t beat yourself up.
Make sure you always allocate more time than just enough for whatever it is you want to do because interruptions and crises don’t give notice. Be kind to yourself, you are doing your best even if you just did 1% better than yesterday. Didn’t wake up on time? It’s okay, prioritise and catch-up with the important things and improvise to meet your goals for that day. If you zoom out, even if you manage to stay on schedule 50% of the days in the first year it would still be a big leap from all those years where you never realised how you spent your time!
