Time Management in the Digital Age: Why Time Management Matters More in the Digital Age

Table of Figures

Figure 1: Fundamental components of time management (Author's illustration)

Figure 2: Priority Action Matrix (Priority Matrix, 2016)

Figure 3: SMART Goals (Merrihew, 2020)

Figure 4: Time management vs. Saving time

Figure 6: Traditional and offline time management tools

Figure 5: Action priority matrix (EPM, 2018)

Figure 7: 4 D time management

Figure 8: Agile Frameworks (JD, 2020)

Figure 9: Similarities and differences in types of time management (Author adaptation)

Figure 10: Time management in the digital age - fundamental components (Author adaptation)

Figure 11: Digital tools, apps, and platforms for time management

Chapter

1

Overview

Today, people are often busier than ever working from home, and managing several obligations at once during the day. With more time at home, people are having to juggle time spent between families, partners, school (whether university or a child’s school), a job, hobbies, and many other activities. Simply put, working remotely often leads to many people struggling to juggle many different things in their lives. In addition to this, many people are losing their ability to pre-plan, create, and effectively manage their daily schedules—often leading to people working too much and losing their work-life balance in the pandemic; or, leading to people working too little and falling behind in the personal and professional duties in and outside of the home.

As a result of this, there is need today—now, more than ever—for people to create and establish effective time management practices in their lives. People need to be able to understand the fundamentals of time management, how to fulfil these aspects of time management, what the best frameworks and practices are, ad what tools are available to them to better manage their time.

In addition to this, however, many people are struggling with time management because of the impact of digital technology and digital work. Remote working, wireless communications, social media (among others) are all significant factors that impact the way people are able to effectively manage their time. As a result of this, many people are fighting a losing battle when it comes to time management in the digital age.

As such, the following research (broken into two parts) will discuss and comprehensively illustrate the various aspects of time management, and time management for people in the digital age. The key takeaways from this research include the following:

Understanding the fundamentals of time management, and how to structure them.

Understand the difference between time management, and time-saving.

Know the frameworks, tools, practices, and strategies that lead to effective time management.

The challenges and impacts of time management, and why it so often fails.

What digital time management is, and the fundamentals of time management in the digital age.

The psychology and growth of digital time management.

Challenges, failures, and factors that most commonly impact digital time management.

The top tools, strategies, software, methods, and practices to lead to more effective digital time management.

Chapter

2

Time Management

As per the key takeaways listed above, the first component of time management toady that needs to be illustrated are the fundamentals of traditional time management. The importance of this is that understanding conventional (or, traditional) time management allows people to better understand how these very same principles and aspects can be applied to digital time management. Thus, the first (of two) parts in this research is to comprehensively understand the fundamentals of time management.

Thus, the following sections will provide understanding into various components of time management. This will include understand what exactly time management is, what the fundamental components of it are, and how to manage these fundamental components. Additionally, this first part of the research will illustrate the impacts and benefits of time management, and how to achieve them; as well as the challenges and failures of time management that people so often find today.

This first part of the research will provide understanding and a foundation of knowledge to fully comprehend exactly how time management is impacted in today’s digital world; and, how people can improve their time management in the digital world we live in today.

Time Management

It is important, however, to set a single definition of time management; so that there is just one understanding that can be referred to throughout the entirety of this research. As such, time management is most commonly defined as:

The process of organizing and planning how to divide time between activities, so that a person’s time and efforts can be maximized during any activity.

In other words, time management is simply the ability of people to—as the name would suggest—manage their time better. Often times, people understand time management to