Knowing Your Time Management Style
Before we begin, I must emphasize the need to remember that we're all individuals. We do not all work - or even learn - in the same way. Some of us, for example, are visual in style: we learn by seeing. Some people, on the other hand, are auditory in style, learning and working best through hearing. And still others are tactile by nature: they need the sense of touch to fully absorb what they need to know.
We're different in other ways, as well. Some of us seem to have been born neat. Or childhood experiences, or being born a Virgo, or some other mysterious series of events made us so. Our childhood bedrooms were the pride of our lucky parents, our handwriting was (and remains) neat and tidy, and our sock drawers are perfectly arranged.
Others of us are natural clutter magnets, with parents who despaired of getting us to clean our rooms. Today, our desks may vary much resemble the bedrooms of our youth. And some of us are a combination-neat one day and untidy the next, with some parts of our lives elegantly organized and other parts in a jumble.
And some of us are organized in what appears to be a wholly disorganized way. Perhaps you're the kind of person who can pull out a sheet of urgently needed paper from the middle of one of a dozen messy stacks in less time than it might take a more obviously organized person to retrieve it from a file cabinet.
The appearance of disorganization (or organization, for that matter) can be deceiving. As you learned in the preface, this book isn't about imposing a "one-style-fits-all" approach to managing your time. Your individual style should dictate which suggestions and tips you'll find most helpful. You may also find, however, that your style undergoes a slight-or even major-transformation as you adopt some of the suggestions you'll learn here. If you're the sort of person who never meets deadlines-whose library books were (or still are) always late-you'll most likely want to change some elements of your style. If you already manage your time well, you presumably are still open to fine-tuning your approach.
We're different in other ways, as well. Some of us seem to have been born neat. Or childhood experiences, or being born a Virgo, or some other mysterious series of events made us so. Our childhood bedrooms were the pride of our lucky parents, our handwriting was (and remains) neat and tidy, and our sock drawers are perfectly arranged.
Others of us are natural clutter magnets, with parents who despaired of getting us to clean our rooms. Today, our desks may vary much resemble the bedrooms of our youth. And some of us are a combination-neat one day and untidy the next, with some parts of our lives elegantly organized and other parts in a jumble.
And some of us are organized in what appears to be a wholly disorganized way. Perhaps you're the kind of person who can pull out a sheet of urgently needed paper from the middle of one of a dozen messy stacks in less time than it might take a more obviously organized person to retrieve it from a file cabinet.
The appearance of disorganization (or organization, for that matter) can be deceiving. As you learned in the preface, this book isn't about imposing a "one-style-fits-all" approach to managing your time. Your individual style should dictate which suggestions and tips you'll find most helpful. You may also find, however, that your style undergoes a slight-or even major-transformation as you adopt some of the suggestions you'll learn here. If you're the sort of person who never meets deadlines-whose library books were (or still are) always late-you'll most likely want to change some elements of your style. If you already manage your time well, you presumably are still open to fine-tuning your approach.