If there is one thing I struggle with in life, it is time management. There always seems to be too much to do in so little time. A friend once asked if I thought 24 hours was enough time in one day. The answer was yes and no. Yes because we are stuck with 24 hours anyway, therefore we must make do with it, and No because there is always undone work spilling into the next day, especially for students and professionals. If one hour is added to each day, making it 25 hours, there still wouldn’t be enough time to do all we set out to do.
I spent some time last year giving this a thought. I was in the thick of exams at the time and struggled to meet up with targets, in the midst of work and other commitments. I was going to bed after 12 midnight each day and had to be at work before 8 am the next day. Some nights, I was getting less than 6 hours of sleep. Yet I was still lagging behind.
I did an analysis of a 24-hour day for a typical professional and arrived at the following. If you do an 8-hour job everyday, you’re left with 16 hours for the rest of the day. Then according to Somnologists (sleep specialists), an adult needs 7-9 hours of sleep per day to maintain good health. That leaves you with 8 hours each day to do whatever else you need to do to progress in life.
But its not that simple. Out of these remaining 8 hours, let’s say you spend an average of 30 minutes commuting to and from work, that’s 1 hour on travelling. Out of the remaining 7 hours, you’ll spend some time preparing and having your meals (breakfast and dinner), say 30 mins each. Then you might have a nap or little rest after work, or you may return some phone calls, or you may catch up with the news. You may read a book, chat with your neighbor or press your phone. You’re left with roughly 4 hours.
So say you’re a PhD student working full time, or a university lecturer preparing articles for professorship assessment, or a surgical registrar doing a masters degree program by the side, you have roughly 4 hours a day to perform any of the necessary tasks (research, writing your articles, studying etc) for career progression. This is just for an ideal situation.
Consider the ‘unideal’ situations. A female banker who works from 7am to 7pm, and has to spend 4 hours commuting through thick Lagos Traffic, has 4 kids and is doing an online MBA at UniLag. She has spent 16 hours already on just work and commute. She has a house full of kids (who have assignments and other needs) and a husband (who also has needs) to return to. So whatever else she has to do (attend to her kids, cook, house chores, study for her MBA etc) has to be done within the 8 hours that is already part of her sleep time.
That is why I am in awe of people (especially women) who have successful careers and successful families, like being a university professor and raising children. It may look effortless when its all done but the hours don’t add up when you look back. If bachelors and spinsters struggle with time, how do people who have families do it? Some of these ‘family people’ still play active roles in the community such as CWO president or treasurer of harvest and bazaar committee.
A few tricks may help to cheat time. One is to squeeze in as much extra tasks as possible into the ‘8-hour’ work time, depending on the type of job. A desk job with lots of free time in between tasks is different from a surgeon with a busy theater day. But if you can squeeze in sending those mails, writing or editing that article, making those calls or answering those past questions during work time, it helps to free up a lot of time after work. Drawing a plan for the day also helps. I have noticed that I achieve more on days when I write a ‘To-Do’ plan than on days when I don’t. Finally, cancelling or postponing some roles to a better time in the future can be very helpful, such as the banker deferring her MBA until her kids are a bit grown up. Tough decision but pragmatic. Time isn’t running away, anyway.