Entrepreneur's article entitled 'How To Manage Time With 10 Tips That Work' is full of the usual clichéd but nevertheless important advice on how to manage your time - sleeping the correct amount of hours a night, removing social networking sites from your workspace and writing down plans. But the most distinct, and perhaps enlightening, point made is that it is not productive to work in 'physical time'.
According to this article there are two types of time: physical time and relative time. In physical time there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year, and all time passes equally. In relative time however, time flies or drags depending on what we are doing, which is why three hours of housework can feel like a week and an hour of your favourite tv show will only feel like 5 minutes.
It is therefore important to recognise that we don't perceive time in a linear format and so we cannot expect to work and be productive using the physical time system. However, we can increase our productivity by specifically factoring for the tasks that we love and the tasks that we dislike, the things that need to be done and the things that we want to do. In terms of writing down an actual plan we would still need to use physical time to allot hours to these tasks, but it is more useful to factor more time for the tasks we dislike (as they will typically take us longer to complete) and divide up that time into manageable chunks separated by small breaks or fun activities. If we know that the tasks we enjoy take a shorter time to complete, these can be scattered throughout the day in order to provide relief from the bigger tasks, while still maintaining productivity.
Ultimately there is no set formula to increasing productivity, and a productivity plan will be unique to each person, but recognising how your individual time is spent allows for a better understanding of where you are losing time and most crucially, where you might gain time.