SSS Corner

Imagine this: you are working on a project/assignment that you have to submit the following day and you decide to take a short break. You send a snapshot on how hardworking you are on Snapchat, you check what your friends ate for lunch via Instagram, you tweet about how panic you are for the deadline, and repeat…… and repeat…… and repeat……

When you look up from your screen, you realize that the sun has set, dinner time has passed, and you haven’t even typed a single complete sentence for your assignment. Sound familiar?

When deadlines aren’t met or your grades keep decreasing every term, it is much easier to put the blame on something else. We can easily find a scapegoat and blame it on how cell phones distract us a lot, how the bombardment of social media is the one responsible, or (the most ridiculous) how “short” time is.

However, none of them will have any power on us if we have one thing: self-management. The ability to self-manage is actually what determines your perceptions of whether time is either short or long.

Self-management means different things in different fields:

In business, education, and psychology, self-management refers to methods, skills, and strategies by which individuals can effectively direct their own activities toward the achievement of objectives, and includes goal setting, planning, scheduling, task tracking, self-evaluation, self-intervention, self-development, etc.

(Retrieved from https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Self-management)

Based on the definition, here are some tips to improve your self-management:

• Self-awareness is paramount.

Self-management is closely related to self-awareness. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses can help a lot in helping you manage yourself.

If you need to finish a project and you know you are easily distracted, try to listen to instrumental music to keep you focus. If you want to lose weight and you know how much you like to binge unhealthy food, stock some healthy snacks at home.

Do you know that to minimize distractions, George R.R. Martin uses a DOS running computer and Wordstar (the ancestor of Microsoft Word) when writing his epic novels?

• Goals keep you stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.

Every manager has goals. Sport managers aim to win as many trophies as possible, Office Managers aim to earn as much profit as possible, while Self-managers aim to improve themselves as much as possible. When you have goals, you can practice to manage yourself accordingly by making proper schedules in order to accomplish them.

• Consistency is the main ingredient.

Making a schedule is easier than sticking to it. Look at at the graph. If you’re a gym-goer, you will notice that your gym is more crowded a few weeks after New Year. New faces with 110% motivation start to appear out of nowhere. However, after a few weeks, most of them will disappear into the abyss.

Be mindful that you will miss your schedule sometimes, but it doesn’t mean that all your efforts get crushed into pieces.

Keep going, add reminders with your cell phone, buy some notepads. The more you stick to your schedule, the more your body will remember, and it will ultimately turn it into a habit.