![]() When you work for yourself, it’s easy to spend a whole day at your desk and accomplish nothing of value. In a Tae Kwon Do studio where I used to train, there’s a huge sign on the wall that says, “Your goal is to become a black belt.” This helps remind each student why s/he is going through such difficult training. The first step is to know exactly what you want. Without further ado, here’s the best of what I’ve learned about mastering time management: Clarity Is Key They allowed me to shave years off my schooling while also giving me about $30,000 to start my business (all earned in my final semester as a game programmer, mostly from royalties). The time management habits I learned in college have served me very well in building my business, so I want to share them with you in the hopes that you’ll find them equally valuable. I pulled this off by applying time management concepts that most people simply didn’t know but that were readily available in books and audio programs at the time (1992-93). I didn’t tell you this story to impress you but rather to make you curious as to how I did it. I was perhaps the only student at the university with a two-page class schedule, so it was easy to prove I was telling the truth if anyone pressed me, but rarely did I ever do so. Most of the time I kept quiet about what I was doing, but if someone asked me how many units I was taking, I didn’t deny it. It took a lot of convincing to get the computer science department chair to approve my extra units every semester, and my classmates often assumed I was either cheating or that I had a twin or that I was just mentally unstable (I get accused of that last one pretty much every week, so maybe there’s some truth to it). If you want a better understanding of where I was at this time in my life and why I decided to attempt such a crazy thing, you might enjoy reading The Meaning of Life: Intro, which includes the full background story and more details about my motivation for doing this. This was simply something I decided to do for myself. In fact, most people were highly discouraging of the idea when I told them about it. I didn’t have any personal mentors helping me, I didn’t know of anyone who’d done anything like this before, and I can’t recall a single person encouraging me to do it. I wasn’t considered a gifted child, and this was the first time I had ever done anything like this. One of my professors later told me that they had an easy time selecting the award recipient once it became clear to them what I was doing. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA and also received a special award given to the top computer science student each year. ![]() My classmates would add up all the hours they expected each task to take and concluded that my weeks must have consisted of about 250 hours. In my final semester, I even held a full time job (40 hours a week) as a game programmer and served as the Vice Chair of the local Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter while taking 37 units of mostly senior-level computer science and math courses. I slept seven to eight hours a night, took care of my routine chores (shopping, cooking, etc), had a social life, and exercised for 30 minutes every morning. I accomplished my goal by graduating with two Bachelor of Science degrees (computer science and mathematics) in just three semesters without attending summer school. I began reading everything I could find on time management and putting what I learned into practice. ![]() It became immediately obvious that I’d have to manage my time extremely well if I wanted to pull this off. In order to accomplish this goal, I determined I’d have to take 30-40 units per semester, when the average student took 12-15 units. This article explains in detail all the time management techniques I used to successfully pull this off. When going to college many years ago, I decided to challenge myself by setting a goal to see if I could graduate in only three semesters, taking the same classes that people would normally take over a four-year period. ![]()
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