3.d 制作时间预算

Make Time Your Friend 3.d: Making a Time Budget

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-18 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113110042/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/430.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

From here on, I will assume you have already formed the first good habit: recording your time spending every day. If you have formed this habit, then the second good habit is almost natural and entirely reasonable. This good habit is: **make your time budget every day**.

Before starting the day's activities, spending 15 to 30 minutes carefully making that day's time budget is absolutely, especially worthwhile—just as another "cliché" puts it: sharpening the axe does not delay the cutting of firewood.
The most direct method is to make a list, setting out the things you need to do today. For convenience of expression, from now on we will call the items on these lists "tasks." For example:

> 1. Memorize vocabulary; also, according to plan, review once the two lists memorized yesterday and last Friday.
> 2. Agreed to watch a movie with so-and-so this evening.
> 3. Go to the library, and at the same time look up material online, find a number of necessary pieces of information, in order to finish a certain article.
> 4. Play football with classmates in the afternoon.
> 5. ……

Of course, when you are listing these tasks—you don't necessarily have to write them down—your mind has long since automatically started estimating how much time each task will actually take. Very soon, the first problem you run into is discovering that **there are too many tasks to finish them all**. So you have no choice but to choose. **In fact, life is about choice**[[1](#footnote_0_430 "Life is about choice.")] .

The way to solve this problem is actually simple: mark each task on the list with a weight—for example, you can mark them with scores of 1 – 5. But please note, don't use a 1 – 10 scale as some books suggest, because in most cases it is very hard for us to distinguish the importance of the things we have to do that precisely. In fact, I think for most people a precision of 1 – 3 is already enough, because scores of 1 – 3 can basically stand for:

> 1. Not important
> 2. Average
> 3. Important

Of course, depending on your preference, you can also mark with 1, 0, -1. There are many ways to do the same thing, and choosing the way you yourself like is often the optimal strategy. Just as everyone often hears: one's own child is always the best.

I even suggest that at the very beginning, it's enough to mark each task very simply as "important" or "not important." That way, marking becomes even simpler: you only need to put a symbol for emphasis in front of the important tasks—an asterisk, for example. Some people like the "米"-shaped asterisk (\*); I personally like the five-pointed star that can be drawn in one stroke (☆); of course, there is one even simpler method, which is to circle that task, or draw a circle in front of it (○).

When you try to mark weights on the things you have to do, you will find that in fact it is not that easy, even if you use only the simplest method of marking—marking only "important" and "not important." Because you have to distinguish "really important" from "seemingly important," and "really unimportant" from "seemingly unimportant."

> | | | |
> | --- | --- | --- |
> | Task | Important | Not important |
> | Really | √ | × |
> | Seemingly | × | √ |

You need to re-examine the tasks already marked "important," because some of them are bound to be merely "seemingly very important." And you also need to re-examine the tasks you considered "not important," because some of them are always, in fact, merely "seemingly unimportant." So you have no choice but to revise some of the weight marks. Don't be afraid of revising. Believe me, in the process of completing any task (making a "time budget" right now is also a task), revision is an indispensable part. If you are revising, it shows you are making progress. The reason many people end up accomplishing nothing in their whole lives is that they are fragile perfectionists, naively hoping they can live perfectly in this imperfect world—and so they are doomed to end in failure. (These words I am writing now are also, in the end, doomed to be revised over and over many times……)

To judge whether a task is "really important," you actually need only one standard: whether completing the task is genuinely beneficial to achieving your goal. [Translator's note: the original repeats 是否 ("whether") twice in this clause, 看这个任务的完成是否对你的目标达成是否确实有益; translated once] But for a normal, ordinary person with all organs complete and healthy and the full range of human emotions and desires, it is very hard to concentrate fully on this most crucial, most fundamental decision standard without some struggle.

For example, everyone likes to do interesting things, and often doesn't care at all whether the thing is actually useful or useless. But the problem is that interesting things aren't necessarily useful!

> | | | |
> | --- | --- | --- |
> | Things to do | Useful (beneficial to achieving the goal) | Useless (not beneficial to achieving the goal) |
> | Interesting | √ | × |
> | Uninteresting | √ | × |

If you shake your head and force yourself to be a bit more rational, you will know that useless things should not be done even if they are very interesting, and useful things should be done even if they are very boring. But please face yourself honestly: in the past, have you always guided your behavior with reason like this?

Often, looking back over your own life, you may painfully discover that you frequently did things that were actually useless merely because they were very interesting. For example, in March you set a goal—to take the TOEFL exam in June. But at the end of May you only then discover that over the past two months, what you did most was play cards with friends or hang out in bars. Or, for another example, in the morning you decide to memorize 200 words during the day, but when you get to the 20th word, a friend calls to say he wants to treat you to dinner, so you go, come back drunk, and go straight to bed—even abandoning the most important habit—recording your time spending.

Without having to learn from anyone, everyone more or less, whether clearly or vaguely, has their own goals—whatever they are, so-called "ideals" or "wishful thinking." Then start right now using that goal of yours, even if it is "unrealistic," as the standard for judging—judging the true nature of each task. Then choose the "really important" ones or the "seemingly unimportant" ones [Translator's note: this sentence has no closing punctuation in the original]

Believe me, forming any habit, however small, requires struggle. Yet the seemingly painful process of struggle will, at some moment in the future, eventually become endlessly enjoyable.

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Footnotes:

1. Life is about choice. [[↩](#identifier_0_430)]

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