Looking through the blog archive, I couldn’t believe I haven’t done a post dedicated to managing the time you have. It’s one of my biggest problems, so how have I not really talked about it before?

First things first, it is my belief that every family has their own “problems”. I’ll talk about this more in-depth later, but these are things that specific families do that make them different. My family has two problems: communication, and time management. We always show up late to things, order birthday presents online a week after their actual birthday, or forget about things entirely (not leaving until after we should be there because we don’t look at the clock). Also, we don’t communicate. It’s not bad on a level of not knowing what to bring to a family gathering so somebody forgets the plates. It’s bad on a level of “nobody told these three people that we were meeting today for X’s birthday”.

It’s especially bad when I need to get picked up after my night class and my usual ride is out of town and gets somebody else to pick me up, only they don’t know where I am and I don’t even know that they’re coming.

So, I’ve tried to diverse myself from that. In regards to time management, I always try my best to never be late to anything, only I never have any concept of how long it takes to get from here to there so I usually end up half an hour early. That causes it’s own problems. Either that, or I’ll think “It doesn’t take that long to get somewhere because I’m always early!” and then I’ll end up late because of it.

In regards to homework, it’s sort of the same thing. I’ll write and prepare stuff a week in advance, which sounds fantastic, but sometimes more details on a project will be let out and it turns out that I did something completely wrong and I’ll have to go back and make a lot of changes, which equates to unnecessary effort.

So, if you’re bad at time management, maybe changes can be made. If you’re always five minutes late to your morning class, instead of trying to do everything five minutes more quickly, perhaps you can simply set the alarm to five minutes earlier? Or ten minutes earlier to account for your enhanced level of sleepiness? And if you’re anything like me, don’t listen to your internal reasoning for how you won’t be late. If your head starts to tell you you’re cutting it close on time, it’s time to leave. If you listen to it you will be late.

It’s always better to be early than late, so if you have as much trouble being on time as I do, go for the former. Time yourself on things. How long does it take for you to take a shower? How long does it take to prepare a sandwich if you need to eat before you leave? How long does it take to go from leaving to actually driving? If you know these numbers in your head instead of internally guessing, your life could suddenly get much easier.