Practical Torah for Time Management

• If we think our lives are complex and busy, imagine God sitting with Godself about to create the world...Imagine you are God and you’ve decided, or have been called to, create the world. Where do you start? What questions would you need to ask or consider?
• What might the fact that Time was created first teach us about time-management?

• What are the “to-do’s” in Maimonides laundry list of Shabbat prep activities?

• How would you map out all of these activities in your schedule if you were going to do them before Shabbat?

• This form of honoring Shabbat takes place before Shabbat itself. What lessons about time-management could you learn from this? How does time-management fit into or contribute to one's other activities?

• Zerizut - loosely translated as alacrity, or avoiding procrastination - is the first middah (character trait) many Mussar thinkers, including Mesilat Yesharim, suggest an individual work on as they seek to improve themselves. Why do you think this is? How does alacrity lead to cleanliness (nekiyut)?
• (I would suggest that once somebody completes their pre-Shabbat "to-do" list in order "to-be" on Shabbat, their minds are able to be "clean" and they can fully enjoy Shabbat without worry about loose ends or the like. This helps make sense of the observation that much of the work of "honoring Shabbat" takes place before Shabbat, rather than on Shabbat itself. By appropriately managing one's time before Shabbat, one can come to enjoy Shabbat even more.)

• Without a pre-Shabbat routine, Maimonides' list might be overwhelming. Creating a calendar or time-boxed checklist is the next logical step, then.

• This is the very first commandment given to the Jewish people as a whole in the Torah. It's so significant that Rashi suggests it would have made more sense for it to open the whole Torah (alas, there are theological and political reasons why it did not). Just as the first thing God created was Time (day/night), the first commandment to the people of Israel was to consider its own Time (the calendar).

• As this text makes clear, the Jewish calendar was to be determined by the Jewish people's own observations and assessments, rather than coming from on-high. Where it is easy to feel like our time is actually someone else's - our boss', our teacher's, our family's, etc. - the Torah is teaching us that our time is our own, and its up to us to craft it accordingly.

• How does God divide up God's time in terms of time, activities?
• Could you categorize the different activities? (for example: studies/intellectual growth (Torah); work and processing (God's judgement), Supporting/serving other (Kindess); and Play/Self-care)
• What lessons can you learn from God's time management? Could you use it as a model for your own life? What would you incorporate or modify?

• According to this text, while acknowledging that Rosh Chodesh and the Jewish calendar is up to the High Court to determine, Shabbat, nevertheless, is not dependent on the High Court. Rather, Shabbat comes whether or not its witnessed and declared as such. It's as if it's a postscript to the previous teaching. Our time is ours to schedule, but we can easily go overboard and become slaves to even our own self-determined calendars. We need a safeguard, which is Shabbat, to remind us of the importance that time-management is only one piece of the puzzle. We need to be sure to rest, recharge, and take care of ourselves, too. In other words, time-management is necessary, but so too is self-management.

• This is a great text for both self-management and time-management. As for the latter, the final line, "If not now, when?" is a critical one for time-management. It can be interpreted as a response to the question, "Is this task actionable?" If the answer is yes, the follow-up question is, "yes," then the follow up is "If not now, when?" That is, if it can be done now, dod it now. If it cannot be done now, then when can it be done? This is reminiscent of the time-management method from David Allen's "Getting Things Done"

If this looks a little bit confusing, don’t be intimidated. Here’s the basic idea:

Throughout your day, you’re constantly bombarded with information, such as things you have to do, errands you have to run, names and phone numbers, etc. All of these things are constantly vying for your attention in your “inbox”. When information like this comes at you, the first question you have to ask yourself is “what is this piece of information?”. Once you decide what it is, you can then answer the question “is it actionable?”. If it’s not actionable, it can go one of 3 places.

First, it could go in the trash. A surprisingly high amount of information we try to hang on to actually belongs here. Many people have a tendency to be digital hoarders, but the reality is that you don’t need all the stuff you say you need. Don’t be afraid to delete things that you don’t think are important. If you decide it actually is important, you could put it either in a someday/maybe folder (if it will be important to review at a later date), or in a reference file so you can access the information easily when you actually need it.

If the information is actionable, you need to ask yourself “what’s the next action?”. If you can’t complete the activity in one step, then it’s actually not an action, it’s a project and needs further planning. A project is anything that contains multiple steps in order to complete it. Chances are you’ll have several projects active at the same time, so in addition to the initial planning phase of the project it’s also very important that you regularly review the project to see if there are any additional steps that are required to complete it.

If the information is not a project and you can actually finish it in 1 step, the next question you need to ask is “will this take less than two minutes?” If it will take less than two minutes to complete the activity, just go ahead and finish it – it will probably take more time and effort to decide on a follow-up plan than it will to actually just complete the activity.

If it will take more than two minutes to complete, you can do one of two things with it: First, you can delegate it to someone else, in which case you need to make sure that it ends up on a waiting list for you to follow up with. Make sure that you don’t just hand it off and forget about it, especially if you are the one ultimately responsible for the completion of the activity. Make sure though that you follow up and make sure that the task gets finished. Second, you can defer it. When you defer a task, you’re pushing it out into the future for one of two reasons: either you need to complete the task at a specific time, or you need something else to be finished before you can get to that task.

If you’re deferring the task because it is time-based (like a meeting), make sure it ends up on your calendar. If it’s not time-based and you’re waiting for something else to be finished before you can get to this task, make sure it ends up on your “next actions” list.

http://www.asianefficiency.com/task-management/gtd-intro/

Something is urgent when it requires immediate attention. Urgent stuff catch your attention and pressure you. The trap is that many of them are easy, or funny, or popular, but they are unimportant.

Something is Important when it contributes to your medium and long term goals, to your life purpose. You need to be proactive not to neglect the activities that are important but not urgent, since they will not demand your attention. If you ignore them, they eventually will become urgent, and this behavior will lead you to a vicious circle involving living always in reactive mode, in a continuous crisis.

If you pay too much attention to Quadrant I (urgent and important things), it will become increasingly larger and will dominate your life completely. Quadrants III and IV include things that, urgent or not, do not matter. Effective people spend more time in Quadrant II, minimize the time spent in Quadrant I, and do not worry too much about Quadrants III and IV.

In Quadrant II (important, but not urgent things) lies the heart of effective personal management. Here are the things that allow you to live and act preventively, seizing opportunities rather than solving problems. Things like creating and reinforcing personal relationships, exercising, long-range planning, learning, etc. To move toward this quadrant, you must first be clear about what your priorities are, and then you must learn to say no to other activities, some of them urgent and apparently important.