Will Palmer ‘21
Special Projects Editor
Everyone’s schedule has taken a hit recently–but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still manage your time effectively! Here, in no particular order, is some helpful advice for organizing your day and streamlining your lifestyle.
- Here’s a tip to start us off: Don’t volunteer to write articles on time management. You’ll save the amount of time it takes to crank out approximately 800 words of bad advice.
- You can save time by multitasking in the shower. If you’re efficient about it, you can brush your teeth, floss, and call your estranged grandmother while you wash. She can’t hear anyway.[1]
- No one wants to get sick, especially these days–but how to keep safe without wasting time? Putting on a mask takes so long. According to the World Health Organization, the most effective (and efficient) way to avoid the Novel Coronavirus is to lather your entire body in a thick layer of hand sanitizer and never, ever go outside. Don’t even leave the bathtub. Hey, I didn’t say it–science did.
Pictured: Flava Flav wears his mask to a grocery store. Photo Courtesy of Drew Calamaro ‘21.
- Meditation can be a powerful productivity tool. To begin your morning, you should spend a half hour in quiet contemplation of your greatest embarrassments and personal failures. Take time to stew over grudges and engage in cycles of negative self-talk. Make a mental checklist of large problems in your life that you have no control over and be sure to review it every few hours.
- It’s important to get a good dose of cortisol early on to start your day off right. Make sure to kick your adrenal glands into overdrive by reading the most recent news about unjustified police killings, raging wildfires, and creeping autocracy as soon as you wake up, thereby setting a thoroughly anxious tone for the rest of your day.
- The first meal of your day heavily impacts your productivity. To maximize your energy levels, be sure to stick with classic breakfast items such as steak, pasta, and foie gras. It’s important to avoid tiring yourself out with unhealthy “quick fixes” like cereal, toast, and eggs. Instead of brewing coffee, just eat a few fistfuls of coffee grounds while you read the news.
- Some of the most productive people on the planet use a technique known as ‘Victimization Visualization.’ This is a thought process wherein the subject spends several minutes imagining themselves as the innocent victim of violent crimes, often creating a deep, lingering sense of personal mistrust and a persistent fight-or-flight mentality. Maintain this sense of suspicion throughout all of your small section meetings and seminars.
- As an alternative to spending an hour going to the gym, clothe yourself in several layers of sweatsuits, and strap on a few dozen pounds’ worth of ankle and wrist weights. Proceed to do jumping jacks until you lose consciousness. You’ll probably come to within a minute or so, at which point you’ll be done with your workout. The best part is, you won’t even remember it.[2]
- To speed up the home cleaning process, I recommend moving out of your apartment and into an abandoned mine shaft, where you will live as an unwashed hermit.
- Managing time spent on social media is key to maintaining focus. To avoid the distraction of having to switch tabs in Chrome, I have entombed myself within a digitally-enhanced sensory deprivation chamber that allows me to watch up to thirty-eight Instagram stories at the same time. In a totally unrelated development, my eyeballs have recently begun to bleed profusely.
- Spend an hour or two each day reviewing the posts of inspirational Instagram personalities (ideally from within your sensory deprivation chamber). Their candid, concise explanations of their own techniques are better than anything you’d find in a book and are incredibly relevant to your life right now.
- Communicating via email can take up a lot of valuable time that you could otherwise spend watching plants grow or watching the Blade trilogy on Blu-Ray. Here’s a free life hack: Go “off the grid” by faking your own death in an elaborate, vehicular-manslaughter-centric ruse and communicate solely by carrier pigeon for the foreseeable future.
- More effective rest can be attained via a variety of methods. I find that spending thirty minutes or so in bed watching live streams of niche European techno festivals is a good way to relax and wind down before I go to sleep. To make getting up early easier, I’ve turned to putting on a “sleep playlist” of Gregorian chanting mixed with the audiobook version of Dante’s Inferno in the original 14th-century Medieval Italian and various historical speeches on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Trust me, you’ll leap out of bed in the morning.
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wtp7bq@virginia.edu