With the limited amount of time we are given on this earth, the individual moments become important in the quest for maximizing the quality of your life. There are as many opinions on what constitutes a quality life as there are people but even if you have a firm idea of how you want to live your life, it is still important that you get the execution right. Through time management, one tries to spend the individual moments that life is made of in the best possible way, so skills in the area of time management is an important life-skill.

Traditional time management focuses on what I would call outside-in time management. This is when you start by making a list of what needs to get done and sorts the items according to some system. This system could be by giving them A, B and C priorities and start with the most important item. It could also be a system like urgent/important classification by Covey (see my article : Transforming Shoulds Into Woulds for more on this system). There are all sorts of ways to to design such a system and you have probably tried one or many of them.

Some of the systems are designed in ways to facilitate the other type of time management, what I would call inside-out time management. This is where you at any moment in time will work on whatever you feel like working on. What you feel like working on might coincide with what needs to be done and vice versa for the outside-in philosophy. Although the goal of the inside-out philosophy, to make sure that your time is spent doing things that you value and think are worth your time, I think most people would quickly reject an inside-out philosophy of time management on the basis that without a need to take care of the uninteresting responsibilities (like paying the bills) your life would probably become a downward spiral. On the other hand a lot of very sucessful people would tell you that they do not go to work because they need to but simply because they want to - and in a sense they have adopted (at least partly) the inside-out philosophy.

The fact that some highly succesful people use the inside-out philosophy and are both very productive and very satisfied with their lives, makes it difficult to categorically reject any variant of the inside-out philosophy as fruitful. I think the inside-out philosophy deserves proper consideration.

Taking another perspective, in addition to living a happy life we all want to live long lives too, at least as long as we are physically healthy. Even though there is a saying : “Time flies when you have fun”, I do not think anyone would interpret this as a reason to live a long dull life. I also think that you have experienced situations in your job that were probably stressful and not very fun but also made you loose track of time simply because you were so mentally preoccupied with the work you were doing. Probably a better statement would then be “Time flies when you are busy” with the addendum that when you have fun you are often very energetic and act quickly, in a sense of being busy but in a good way.

This brings me to the term I call “Time Development”. Time Development is the conscious act of trying to improve the quality of the moments in your life given the constraints that your duties and responsibilities impose on you. This aims to transform your life from a life dictated by outside-in time management to a life that uses inside-out time management but just happens to take care of the necessary duties and responsibilities. The living proof that this is even possible are those highly succesful people who have pulled it off. Of course this is no easy task and probably something you will need to work on perfecting for the rest of your life. With this article I hope to spark in you the idea that there is such a thing as an ideal way of time management and although it is something you will need to work on and not just a specific technique that 1..2..3 will make your life perfect, it is still preferable to either of the outside-in/inside-out extremes.

Another way of saying that you should transform your life from using outside-in time management to using inside-out time management is to say you should transform shoulds into woulds and if you have not already done so, I would suggest my previous article on exactly that subject as further reading.

Related Articles:

• Transforming Shoulds Into Woulds
• Trading In Your Freedom