Create your spacetime

We’re naturally good at thinking in space. After all, we move daily in our physical surroundings. We aren’t so good at time. And that costs us health, wealth, and opportunities. But we can become better.

We can learn to think long-term and to think about time visually. We have tools for that.

Calendar is a basic one. It allows us to use our spatial cognitive abilities and translate to time. Calendar is composed of boxes or blocks sorted in columns.

Another tool we have is the timeline. Timeline is, unsurprisingly, a line and events can be visualized as points.

Graphs that change through time are also great. Particularly graphs showing trends over time. We hate when the trend goes down.

An example graph I used to keep myself moving ahead with writing daily 2 years ago.

Without a clear visual blueprint for how we’ll act and when, it’s easy to slip up, procrastinate, and rush to get work done 5 min before a deadline. It’s easy to work unsystematically, erratically based on the current mood and preoccupation. That’s not how professionals do things.

Just as an architect needs a detailed floorplan, so should we have a detailed visual plan for how we want to use our time.

Could you use more boxes, lines and graphs to order your day, week, month, or even a year?