→ Life Design Wiki

One of the most important elements of life design is properly allocating your time, so that you have enough to get the right things done. An easy way to do this is to create a time table: a template that can shape your days and weeks. When you use a time table, you give your time a structure and see how many hours you allocated for any given task. Because our lives all involve a certain amount of routine, almost anyone will benefit from using a time table.

We all have routines and certain set ways of spending our time. Some of them are related to our work (checking our email every morning, having a departmental meeting every Tuesday at ten). Some of them are related to our personal lives (taking our daughter to piano class every Wednesday at four, playing tennis every Saturday from 10 to noon.) Setting up a time table starts by blocking in all the routines we already know we will be doing on any given day of the week. Depending on a few factors, we may have different time tables that reflect our different usage of time. For example, parents with school children may find it useful to have a regular and a school holiday time table.

We can now identify at a glance any time that is not blocked in by our daily and weekly routines as available. For a time table to be useful, we need to plan it out carefully and make sure it accurately reflects our use of time.

→ Related articles: How to Become More Time Conscious
→ Related term at Wikipedia: Time Management
→ More about our Life Design e-book

→ Next term: Values and Life Design