Week 1.1: The Art of Time Management

There is no denying it, effective time management is the first challenge and not unexpected either. With each module requiring in the region of 300 hours self-directed study over a 12 week period I need to make an average of 25 hours per week to get through the workload.

To quote one of my business mentors, Nigel Botterill, the founder of the Entrepreneur’s Circle, “I can be a good husband, a good father or a good businessman but I can’t be all three at once.” Holding down a full-time position as a Development Manager, being a husband and father who’s children are heavily into their sports and a part-time student isn’t going to leave much room for anything else. I fell into the trap of overcommitting and poor time management when I first started my photography business — the big lesson then being ‘working 20 hours a day was not sustainable.’ My business very nearly failed. Nothing got completed, my workload was increasing out of control and I was constantly bouncing back and forth between feast and famine. Clearly something had to change: I needed to get better at time management.

The Indie Game Dev course requires those same skills and techniques. Week 1 is about to end and I feel it was a gentle introduction into postgraduate life. Nevertheless this is the second evening this week I’ve been working past midnight and I suspect the workload will increase on subsequent weeks.

The Default Diary

One of the very first thing my coach, Angus, had me do when he became my business coach was to set up a default diary . The concept is very simple: divide the week up into chunks of time, each one dedicated to a specific task or type of task.

I plan to keep it simple and only show the main activities: family, education, work and ‘guilt free’ R&R. What goes into those blocks? I’ll add that in a future post about workflow and project management.

PLOW and PLOD

PLOW and PLOD is a time management technique taught by the Royal Navy (or so I’m told)**. I first learned of it at a seminar and in the first two chapters of his book discusses something very similar in terms of goal setting and daily planning.

[** I’ve been unable to verify this and if you can conclusively say it is/isn’t I’d very much like to know.]

PLOW and PLOD stand for ‘Plan of the Week’ and ‘Plan of the Day’ respectively. The PLOW is created first to define up to 5 things to complete in the forthcoming week. The PLOD then breaks these down into smaller, bite-sized tasks that together add up to complete the PLOW.

As a time management technique I’ve found this to be very effective if the work is well defined and can be broken down into smaller chunks. It’s very similar to Agile practice too where the PLOW is analogous to the sprint concept and the PLOD represents the stories on the backlog.

Bibliography

Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash