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Episode Two, Season One
Welcome to the autodidactic podcast with your host Rick Dearman.
Hi, and welcome to the autodidactic podcast. This is Episode Two, Season One and I’m your host, Rick Dearman.
If you’re a first time listener, I want to welcome you to the show, and I’m glad that you’re visiting. If you haven’t already, please visit the website autodidactic.info where you’ll find links to all the show and to the show notes, which contain any links to anything I talk about on the show.
Today, I want to discuss time management. Why? Because when you’re going to study, when are you going to find time to study if you can’t manage your time effectively? So I’m going to cover most of the basic things about time management and some important ways to steal time. Later in the show. I’ll tell you what I found to be the most effective way of keeping on top of studying by the use of what I like to call dead time.
If you’re interested in giving me feedback about the show or suggestions, please email me at rick@ autodidactic.info. I’ve had some feedback already from beta listeners and I’m shaping the episodes for the rest of the season accordingly. I’ve been struggling to get everything related to the podcast done while still continuing my own study regime. So, I know your pain if you’re struggling to implement some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today.
I quoted to one of my friends recently; If you love life than value time, because that is what life is made of and remember: you don’t have to be perfect just better than you were yesterday.
Okay, so let’s talk about prioritization using four quadrants. Imagine you’re drawing a square on a piece of paper and then split the square in the middle from top to bottom with another line and then split it again from left to right.
Let’s discover prioritization using this square and it’s four quadrants. Imagine that you put a label on the bottom line called urgency on a label on the left-most line as importance. So the point at the bottom of our square zero and the level of urgency grows as you move to the right and the importance see grows as you move up.
Now imagine you’re writing a letter in each quadrant. In the bottom left quadrant of the square, we’re going to put the letter A.
A represents things which are not important and are not urgent. As we move along the right, to the right quadrant, on the bottom will mark this one is B. Because B is urgent, but it’s not important.
Now if we go to the top left quadrant we’ll mark, this one as C. That is because it’s important but not urgent.
And finally, we’ll put the letter D into the top right quadrant because this is both urgent and important.
Now. If you were to take your to do list and categorize every action that you have to do as A, B, C or D, then you’ll be able to see the priorities of your to do list. So my suggestion is that you would immediately strike out anything that you marked as A. Why? Well, because they’re not important and they’re not urgent, and they will just suck up your time and not let you get on to other things.
Once upon a time, there was a professor who showed his class a glass tube, which he then filled with well rocks, and he asked the class if it was full when he had got to the top and they all said yes. And then the professor reached under his desk and pulled out a bag of sand, which he then poured into the glass container. Then he told them that it was full.
But had he done it the other way around and filled it with sand first, he would have never got the rocks in. Now the point here is to not fill your day with small, unimportant tasks. You need to do the big stuff first, which means you need to schedule time for it.
Now if we go back to your to do list and we looked at the items that were marked as category B, these are urgent, but not important. And here you need to use some discretion, but you should probably just ignore all of these or as many of them you can as well, because they’re not important.
So finally we’re left with C and D. Well, you’re gonna need to work on things marked D, because not only are they important they’re also urgent. But D is a funny category because if you looked at the things that are in D you can probably see that at some point in the past, the things that we’re now categorized as D, urgent and important, probably sat for awhile in category C because it was important and it’s always been important, but until recently, it hasn’t become urgent, and you weren’t working on it.
One of the things that generally tends to sit in category C for most people is self education, career enhancement, that sort of thing. And these things don’t get moved into quadrant D, typically until it’s too late. So, for example, you may have had a goal of learning a second language and that sits in category C. But you can’t wait until two weeks before you arrive in country to start, because you’re never going to get it done. You should have been working on it when it was in Category C, long before it ever got into Category D. And many things in self education, self improvement or career enhancement tend to fall into category C.
Now, time management really isn’t about managing time because, quite honestly, you can’t manage time. It isn’t like managing money. You can’t borrow it. You can’t sell it. You can’t buy it. You can’t loan it out and you don’t get any interest on it.
The universe is very equal and fair. All humans, insects, birds, mammals, absolutely everything, and everyone, gets exactly 86,400 seconds each day. No more, no less. How you use those seconds are up to you.
So if you’re listening to this podcast and chances are you’re aware that time is ticking and that you need to be working on your category C stuff. Removing all of the category A and B things should help you buy some time. But one of the best things I found for studying is to put it in your calendar and schedule time to do it.
A lot of people tell you to get up an hour early to study, which should be a quick and simple solution. However, someone told me this once, and I decided that that advice is just a little bit too flippant because, you see, at the time I was getting up at five am to commute to a job. So getting up an hour earlier at 4 a.m. it wasn’t gonna happen.
But scheduling time into your day might work. So, for example, your hour at lunchtime. Getting up an hour earlier might be a solution for you, but for me, it wasn’t a solution. Now, one solution I did find is what I call studying during dead time.
What is dead time? Well, dead time is a time where I’m forced to do something, but it isn’t really productive. And a very good example of this was commuting into work on a train. I used to commute for about an hour and a half back and forth to work each day.
Which meant three hours of dead time every day, 15 hours of dead time per week. Now I could have done what most people do on the train and just read a newspaper or listen to music, or even watched the film. But I decided I was gonna put that time to work. So I studied. I studied French and Italian or I read books which I needed for career developed and that three hours a day or 15 hours a week was some of the most productive time I actually had.
But there’s other examples of dead time. For example, for a different job, I had to drive to work. Now, here too, I had a lot of dead time. It was not productive, and there wasn’t really anything I could do. What I decided to do during this time was listened to audiobooks. Or speak into a voice recorder and used the transcripts software to turn it into text. Two of the draft of some fiction books, which I have published, were written while in that car, driving back and forth to that job.
So dead time can be your friend. You just can’t waste it, and you need to find ways to use this dead time. If you’ve got an hour or two of unproductive time each day, then you need to see how you can use that time to accomplish your category C goals.
Now, another thing that a lot of people do, and some advice that is given out, is to stop watching television, since it doesn’t really help your education. And I do agree with this or as Groucho Marx once said: I find television very educational because every time someone turns on the set, I go into another room and read a book.
Everybody’s got dead time or unproductive time that you could use instead for education. But if you can’t find any of this dead time, then you’re gonna need to steal time. Now, how do you steal time?
Well, I was able to get three hours of dead time on my train journey, as I told you earlier, but I also stole time in order to study languages. If you remember the story about the professor and the sand, we view the rocks as the dead time that you were getting back these large hours here and there. Then we can look at the sand as the few minutes where we normally spend waiting for something. You’re waiting for a tea kettle to boil or for the barista to hand you your coffee. You’re waiting in a line at the bank. You’re waiting in a line for the train. You’re waiting to get a ticket.
Human beings will spend approximately six months of their life in a line waiting for something, which is about three days a year queuing up. 72 hours of time, which you can steal back every year and you can steal back this time by being prepared and using things like flash cards. So if you’ve got a flash cards already made, you can pull them out of your pocket while you’re waiting for your tea kettle to boil and you can study it.
But nowadays, with the advent of technology, you can use an app like Anki (https://ankiweb.net) which allows you to memorize just about anything. Anki is a spaced repetition software, which is available on most devices and computers. And it will allow you to memorize parts of the bodies, capitals of countries, Russian vocabulary, the periodic table, square roots, you name it. It’ll help you memorize it through space repetition. And you just need to be ready to use these moments and to steal them when they become available.
Outside of stealing time and finding dead time. As I said before, one of the best techniques I found was to schedule your study time. If you’re going to schedule it, it might be your lunch hour. It might be one hour after your children go to bed, but during that hour, or you’re dead time or the stolen seconds, you’ll be progressing in your category C tasks of the coming autodidactic.
So in closing, I hope that what I’ve shared with you today is giving you some incentive to try and manage yourself and your time a bit better. Hopefully, it’s given you the incentive to study time management in more detail. You really can’t go wrong in your quest to be an autodidactic by starting with the study of time management techniques.
In the next episode, I want to dive into the actual study time itself and look at how we divvy up this study. Now, this is especially important if you want to be a polymath on a polymath as a person who is well schooled in multiple subjects.
Now, with that in mind, I’d like you to leave you with a little question to think about until the next podcast.
Is it better to study four subjects an hour day, rotating the subjects each day? Or is it better to study each subject for only 15 minutes of your hour?
If you’re interested in giving me feedback about the show or suggestions, please email me at rick@autodidactic.info, and I’d like to thank you too, for taking the time to listen to this podcast. And I hope you feel that this was time well spent.
Thank you for listening to the auto didactic podcast with your host Rick Dearman, if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider giving a donation by a Paypal. Thank you very much, and see you again next time.