S3EP5: Management of my time

Autodidactic Podcast Season Three
Autodidactic Podcast Season Three
S3EP5: Management of my time
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Hello and Welcome to the Autodidactic Podcast Season three, episode five. In this episode, I want to cover time management. I covered this in episode two of season one. But it’s become more relevant to me recently since I started a new job and I’m in the middle of my destupidification project.

And finding time to study is becoming more and more of an issue time management. When you’re going to study, you’re going to have to find time to study and do this effectively. I’ve tried to use most of the basic time management techniques and try to find ways to steal time to allow myself to carry on working on the destupidification project.

One of the first things that I did was prioritization, I needed to determine how much time I had each day and how much time each of the study periods were going to last and how much I could study during that time. And from that I whittled away at the things which I had planned to study. So originally my list was quite large and very comprehensive, but I’ve cut that right back to only studying one or two things and this is the things that I consider a priority at this time and things that I want to learn.

In my previous podcast, I talked about doing prioritization using four quadrants where you have a bottom line called urgency and then a left line going up as importance and then you plot where this particular item is on that chart. I didn’t go through all of that sort of formal exercise since I more or less knew what I wanted to study and of course as I’m doing this audited tactically by myself as a self learner. I don’t have any external influence that I have to take into account. One of the problems that you have is that you have to fill in the time with larger chunks of work before you fill in the time with smaller chunks of work. And so what I decided to do was try to fill the largest amount of time I had with my study period. So the largest amount of time I have at the moment is actually my commute into an out of work. And so I have used that time to study and or read.

So one of my objectives is to read more literature, English literature and I’ve used that commute time to do that. I’ve also used to commute time to read PDFs and some study time. This is because I have a tablet which I can use to read PDFs and I’m generally okay with studying on a train time management as I’ve pointed out in the earlier episode isn’t really about managing time, it’s really about managing yourself because you can’t actually manage time. You can’t borrow it, you can’t sell it, you can’t buy it, you can’t loan it out, you don’t get interest on it.

So really it’s self management is what we’re talking about here. There was a suggestion that I thought of myself which was, well I could get up a bit earlier in order to study but on days that I commute that is not really acceptable to me since I get up very early anyway. And so I just don’t see the point of getting up at four am because I’ll be half asleep and I won’t actually get much use out of this study period. So for me studying on the train is one of the best solutions and where I can’t do that, I try to study at my lunchtime or I try and fit in half an hour in the evening. Now one of the solutions that I have is mentioned in in the previous podcast, which was dead time and these are times when you’re sort of standing in a queue waiting for a coffee or when I’m standing waiting for a train or whatever.

Sometimes this dead time can work for me if I use something like Anke, which is a spaced repetition software to prompt me and reminded me of questions and things. So that is useful to try and fill in the dead time. One of the other things I found useful was I have a program called FB reader which is a free ebook reader is what it stands for and it’s an app I can put on my phone and in it, I can read e books. So I have downloaded some english literature Shakespeare and I can just open my phone and look at it and read and review it. I have read the whole thing but now I’m just sort of going back and looking at it and reviewing and thinking about it. I’ve also used this sort of dead time to try and recall phone numbers, birthdays, that sort of thing because if you’ll remember parts of my destupidification project was trying to memorize personal phone numbers and details about my friends and family. So those sort of spaces, those little snippets of dead time. I do try and use those up for either my memorization or sometimes for reading the bulk of my study time is actually on the commute.

And although it is not as silent and focused as you would get if you were sat at home with a desk, I can do it and I find that it is useful for me. So I’ll continue to do that on the subjects that I use. The only problem that I have with this is the tools that I used to read and study on the train. Don’t have some of the things that I would use at a desk.

I don’t have the program with the highlighting software. I don’t have access to my files where I write down the prompts and things. So here I’m just using an old notebook and noting down things that I will later put into my quizzes when I get back to my desktop and things that I will highlight when I get back to my desktop. It’s not the best way to do it, but it gives me a bit of time and it helps me carry on, even though I’m very, very time constrained during this period.

So that’s what I’m doing at the moment. I hope you’re enjoying this series. If you have any suggestions or you feel like giving me feedback about the show, please email me at rick at auto didactic dot info. And I’d like to thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast because I know that we all have things we need to do and I’m glad that you’ve made me part of your time management. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy the show.”

(This transcript was computer generated. Apology for any errors)

Associated YouTube video about last weeks progress.

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