Espiritu, Carl Angelo

Basecamp 73 Week 7 Self-paced

How to gain control of your free time by Laura Vanderkam

What did you learn about prioritization and time management from this video? What are
your main takeaways from the video?

● This talk provides practical solutions as to how we can optimize our lives for better time
management. The key is to prioritize our tasks and actions properly while finding little
pockets of time to utilize better. First is the common idea of time management is to
remove or reduce the time that would ultimately add up to an ample amount of time to do
something productive and meaningful. Vanderkam said exactly that “We don’t build the
lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.”

She also mentioned the concept of time. And what this shows us is that time is highly
elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we
choose to put into it. So the key to time management is treating our priorities correctly.
Vanderkam says in our priorities that “We treat our priorities as the equivalent of that
broken water heater by putting them into our schedules first.” This means planning the
week before we’re in it.

There are also strategies to implement that “time is a choice”. One is to pretend that it is
the end of the year and do an annual performance review. Write all the things that you
(want to) do to make the year better. Now that we have a list of things that we can work
on between now and the end of the year. We can prioritize them by putting them on
schedule. The second is to divide them into three categories – career, relationships, and
self. Put at least a couple of points in each. Most of the time we focus on the career part
and forget the rest. We need to make sure that it is not the case and we focus on each of
them equally. Then, look over the whole of next week and set plans to act on them.

The talk also emphasizes sorting out our priorities. To find time, we need to make time.
Therefore, we have to prioritize our actions and commitment accordingly. Nothing is
going to happen if you have pockets of 5 minutes in between tasks and we pull out our
phone to check our emails or refresh our Instagram feed. Instead, if one of our goals is
to read more books, we can utilize that 5 minutes for quick readings. “Small moments
can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy.” We have so many
“small moments” like that and we can start maximizing that.

How can you apply what you have learned from this video in your personal and
professional life?
● The video taught me to become aware of how I spend my time including the free time I
have on weekends. The question that resonated with me is that how can I manage my
time if I had no idea what I already did with the time I had? I can start by tracking how
much time I spent on each task so that I can awaken my consciousness as to the things
that I am prioritizing unknowingly.

Another thing is setting long-term goals by asking myself “What do I want to be?”. By
doing this, I can consistently tell myself continuously what am I and where I will be at the
end of the year. This will serve as the compass that motivates me to push through and
direct my time towards those goals. I will write my realistic goals by starting small. It is
okay to even make a little progress. I believe that something is better than nothing.

After tracking and asking myself the things that I want, I can now divide the effort
required for each of those goals into months and weeks. As Laura suggests, scheduling
time for all these priorities in my calendar a week before. Preferably on Friday afternoons
because no one has the mood to be productive during that time. Another thing is
applying the concept of the broken water heater. For every to-do task on my list, I wrote
about what would happen if I didn't do it. This would answer questions like what do I take
for granted? What do I need in life? Am I selfish? What is important to me? Who is
important to me? This would be my baseline of treating my goals with the utmost priority
every day.