Fill the Jar with Rocks, Then Stones, Then Sand. How to Keep Going with a 90+ Hour Week

Fill the jar with rocks, then stones, then sand. How to keep going with a 90+ hour week

When I tell people that I’m working and still studying at the same time, they think I am crazy. They think that I have no life outside of work. Well it’s not really true. Here are the steps I actually do to be able to manage my time effectively and maintain a high level of productivity.

1. List all your group activities: You have 168 hours in a week. You need to create a list with all your activities and the time you want to allocate to each one. This is similar to a to-do list.

2. Set up your list of priorities: You need to sort your activities in order of priority. In case you need more time on a certain activity, you can cut from another that is less important. As you can see, resting is the most important thing to me because without it I can’t function properly. I also like to add the minimum time I have to allocate to each activity so that I know how many hours I can cut if needed. For example, if work only takes 40 hours, I have 10 hours to redistribute somewhere else.

3. Make a weekly schedule: Place your top activities in a schedule by specifying the start date, the hours you are willing to put for the week and the time it’s going to take in days to complete (lead time). I also specify the due date. You can also subdivide each task with more speficic tasks.

4. Review your week: At the end of the week, review it and make sure to check what went well and what went wrong so you can improve for the subsequent weeks. Did you waste time? What can you do to complete each task faster? Do you need to cut hours in another task?

5. Do some introspection: How was your stress this week? Did you take enough time to think about something else other than work? Did you eat well?