How to Strategically Allocate Time and Your Other 6 Resources

It would be great if students had enough time to prepare for class, go to class, work, and pursue passion projects with abandon… but most don’t.

That said, students can still make the best of the time they have if they think strategically. My goal here is to show students (or anyone, really) how to do that.

The first thing to realize is that time is only one of the resources we need to manage. When schools offer personal productivity seminars to students, it’s usually about “time management.” Although time is the most obvious of our resources and its effective management is crucial, it’s not sufficient. There are six other resources at our disposal.

The second thing to know is that resource allocation must be planned out. You can just read this article if you want — you’ll learn a few things — but maximizing your resource efficacy requires thoughtfulness. Sit down with a cup of coffee and take it seriously.

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is ‘look under foot.’ You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

–John Burroughs

Basic Strategy

The basic strategy is to allocate a large amount of resources (time plus the other six resources, discussed below) to focus sessions. A focus session is when you cut yourself off from the outside world (to the extent possible) and get the truly important stuff done. During these sessions, you take the actions most aligned with your goals. Not the low-hanging fruit. Instead, you’re climbing the tree for the good stuff.The remaining resources are allocated for less important actions.

Resources

The seven resources are:

• Time
• Energy
• Focus
• Length of session (the more, the better) and Lapse between sessions (the less, the better)
• Organizational efficacy
• Nimbleness (being able to pursue long term objectives even when the short term world rears itself)
• Grit

The easiest way to remember these resources is to think TEFLON. (Look at the emboldened letters above — they spell it out.) The seventh resource, grit, is represented by the word ‘Teflon’ itself.

Below I describe each of these resources and how to most effectively allocate them.

Time

Action Step: Time is the easiest resource to calculate. Sketch out your typical weekly and daily schedule. Include all obligations, school, work and otherwise: sleeping, eating, driving, time with family and/or friends, etc. Like most people, your day-to-day and week-to-week changes, but this exercise is primarily to illustrate these concepts, so define “typical” broadly as needed. As the most obvious personal resource, time provides a perfect starting point, as well as a ‘backdrop’ for the rest of this exercise.

Energy

Some tasks require more or less energy than others, and our energy levels ebb and flow in reasonably predictable ways (e.g., “morning people” versus “night owls.”) It thus makes sense to proactively match the high-energy tasks for when our energy is high, and lower-energy tasks for when our energy is low.

The short term world loves to distract us when we are at our best. It also loves to trick us into sacrificing energy and making more time through skipping sleep or other bad habits. Good energy management is critical.

Action Step: On your schedule, mark when your energy levels are particularly high and particularly low. Another way of thinking about this is to ask questions such as:

• When am I best able to focus and do your best work?
• When do I struggle the most?
• Do I feel best after a certain activity (e.g. exercise or watching a clip from Rocky)?
• Do I feel worst on Mondays?

There is no need to draw the entire pattern of your ebbs and flows, just the most obvious will do. Also, begin thinking about these energy phases in the context of your time resources. Is your energy highest during the available time slots, or is it highest when you’re mindlessly commuting to work?

Focus

We can have infinite time and infinite energy, but if we aren’t focused on a particular task, we will accomplish nothing.

Focus is not off/on, all or nothing. The more focus we have, the more effective we are. Focus, like muscles, can be trained. There are many steps we can take to increase our level of focus. We can squirrel away and turn our phones off, reducing the chance of disruption. We can keep our workspace clear of clutter so our mind doesn’t wander. Instead of doing work at the kitchen table, we can do it at the library.

At a higher-level, we can also keep the peace with our family members and friends so emotional drama remains low. We can drink coffee, eat nutritious foods, or do any one of a number of things. In addition to these ‘top-down’ approaches, we can also improve our focus ‘bottom-up’ by precisely defining what our objective is before we begin a work session. If we fence in our mind, we give it less space to wander.

Action Step: Mark in your schedule those times when you are best and least able to focus. This may or may not overlap with your energy states. If there are no set times, then consider what the set circumstances are. Maybe it’s after you’ve exercised, or when you are in a particular room, listening to a particular type of music, etc.

Length/Lapse

Every time you switch tasks, you pay a cost. Inevitably, when you switch tasks, your brain must process what you just did and where you left off in Task A, and then must become reoriented to Task B. This is why multi-tasking is usually a bad idea. You are actually just switching back and forth from task to task, paying costs without proportional benefits. Over time, the costs go from paltry to substantial.

The longer your sessions are (particularly on the most challenging tasks), and the shorter the lapse between sessions is, the less time spent in these in-between moments. Thus, time is saved.

Let me provide an example: Compare spending 5 minutes on a task on 12 consecutive days (1 hour) to spending 30 minutes on a task on two consecutive days (1 hour.) Which is better? I would argue the latter is far better. In the former, you will spend most of the 5 minutes figuring out what to do, and little time actually doing it. In two 30-minute sessions, you will be able to think deeply about your task and make progress.

If I change the example and make the two 30-minute sessions several days apart, then the comparison becomes more complicated. It is probably still better to spend the 2 longer sessions, but you will no doubt have to spend time during the second session remembering back to the first. You will inevitably cover the same ground twice. The shorter the lapse between sessions, the better off we are.

The greater the focus required of a project, the more challenging it is, the more important it is to have large blocks of uninterrupted time. In such sessions, with the requisite energy and focus, you can enter a “flow state.” In such a state — which is rare, at least for me — you can become like Michael Jordan shooting hoops, knocking down your tasks and making progress on your goals with unprecedented amounts of efficiency and effectiveness. It’s pretty awesome when it happens, so give it an opportunity to do so.

Action Step: Looking at your schedule, mark the places you can schedule longer work sessions of 30 or more minutes and where you can schedule them so that lapses are minimized. Ideally, you will have (or can make) some sessions that are 90 minutes or longer.

Organizational Efficacy

Trying to remember where you left off, looking for papers from a pile stacked on your desk, or a file somewhere on your computer, all of these waste resources. If we spend just 10 minutes a day shuffling the same papers around to clear our desk, that’s 3,650 minutes a year, or about 60 hours, or about 1.5 work weeks. Don’t waste your resources. Get organized. It is difficult in a world where spam crowds our inboxes and possessions accumulate like dust in an attic. And organization does not come naturally to some people — myself included — but a thoughtful organizational system is really helpful. And if I can do it, so can you. Trust me.

You need not reach the organizational zenith, but small changes reap disproportionally large benefits. For example, spending just a few minutes to write down where you left off (“breadcrumbs”) will save you significant amounts of resources in the long term and stress in the short term.

Keep in mind that organization is about more than your workspace, incoming e-mail, and your messy closet. It’s about task management; it’s about staying on top of your stuff generally.

Action Step: Assess your current organizational structure. Is it a mess? Do you have no idea what “task management” is? Do you use a serious app like OmniFocus to track your tasks, or maybe a series of post-it reminders and checklists? Maybe just your memory or occasional scrap of paper? Make note of your current system, obvious ways you could improve it, and mark any times that are routinely involved (for example, if you sometimes write a to-do list in the mornings.)

Nimbleness

Ten or fifteen minutes here, ten or fifteen minutes there. It happens throughout the day. On the train, when a coworker is late for a meeting, when you are waiting for class to begin. You can either check Facebook or Twitter on your phone, or you can do something productive. Added up over time (see the math above), that’s a nice chunk. If we aren’t prepared to do something in those in-between moments, then we’ll spend 4 of the 5 minutes deciding what to do.

If we are nimble, then we are prepared to take advantage of these opportunities.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

— Marcus Aurelius

Maybe there’s a decision you need to think through, and a few minutes of silence will give you the chance to get the wheels moving. (I return to this idea in a later chapter; it can be a really easy way to get something done and save resources.) Maybe there is a list of e-mails you can quickly reply to. A bag you can organize. A few thoughts you should jot down. Maybe you can edit a single page of something you’re writing. Just be prepared for when the opportunities come.

Nimbleness is not just about seizing opportunities; it is about making the best of situations as they develop. Even if you’re squirreled away, and your phone is off, interruptions will occur. You cannot predict when they occur, but you can predict that they will occur. They are predictably unpredictable, so be prepared to end your tasks abruptly but effectively. Keep a pad of paper nearby so you can quickly jot down where you left off in a given task. Then nimbly continue being productive.

If, at the beginning of every day, you have a plan for how to use any “free” time, and if, at the beginning of every work session, you have a plan for what you will do if interrupted, you will accrue hours upon hours of productivity. All for the price of not knowing what your second cousin’s ex — girlfriend’s new Facebook status says. What benefit does checking Facebook five times a day provide that once a day doesn’t?

Action Step: Consider where in your life you can be nimble and what you can do during those little opportunities.

Grit

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

–Clementine Paddleford

The other resources exist, in one form or another, before they are called upon. Grit is made at the moment before it is used. When we sit down to complete a task, we feel varying amounts of motivation and resistance, usually in inverse proportion to each other. Motivation is the desire and willingness to get something done. Resistance has many forms — procrastination, indecisiveness, anxiety, fear, among others. These two wage war in our minds — the proverbial angel and devil on our shoulders.

Neither motivation nor resistance force our hand. We choose the actions we take, and thus we determine whether the Resistance will win, or whether we’ll show the “grit” necessary to power through. The more we call upon our grit, the easier it becomes to call upon in the future. If we choose again and again to move forward despite the devil on our shoulder, we weaken it.

Action Step: Think about the contexts in which you feel high motivation and low resistance, and vice versa. Maybe it is when your energy is highest (“I can do this and do it well”) or maybe when it is lowest (“Oh, who cares, I’ll just do it and get it over with.”) Maybe it’s when you can really focus on something. There are countless possibilities.

Also think through how you deal with these default states of motivation and resistance:

• Can you see any common threads?
• Does this provide any insight into your general productivity?
• Do you have more grit early in the week, but when it wanes?
• Maybe you show grit in the face of certain challenges but not others?
• Maybe you have more grit after you see a powerful movie or read an inspiring book?

See what tentative conclusions you can draw, and how this fits in your larger long term picture.

Now what?

Hopefully you’ve learned more about yourself and your tendencies. With this knowledge, you can more effectively allocate your resources. Can you get everything done? Probably not. But you can certainly get more done. And, more importantly, you can do it secure in the knowledge that you’re truly doing the best you can.

That’s all that matters.