Most people think of time as intangible. In the journey from chaos to order, it is often easier to organize space than time because space is something you can actually see. Stacks of papers, piles of clothing, and shelves full of knickknacks are visible. You can pick things up and move them around in your space to see how they fit.

            Time, on the other hand, is completely invisible. It’s something you feel, and it feels . . . utterly amorphous. How long is a day? Well, that depends on your energy and how much sleep you had. How long is an hour? Well, if you’re doing something you love, it whizzes by; but if you’re doing something dreadful, it crawls painfully along. As long as time remains slippery and elusive, you will have trouble managing your days. To be successful, you need to change your perception of time and see it in more visual, measurable terms. The secret is to realize that organizing time is exactly like organizing space. Let’s compare a cluttered closet to a cluttered schedule.             

            Essentially, just as a closet is a limited space into which you must fit a certain number of objects, a schedule is a limited space into which you must fit a certain number of tasks. When you start thinking about it this way, time isn’t so intangible and elusive at all. In fact, each day is simply a container, a storage unit that has a definite capacity you can reach.              

            Once you understand that time is a container, you begin to view your to-dos differently. Just as each object you put into your closet takes up a certain amount of space, each task you put into your day takes up a certain amount of time. It becomes critical to evaluate your to-dos in terms of their size (duration) in order to determine whether or not they will fit into your schedule.