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Fragmented Time and Block Time
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This Blog has also been published on www.heavenartery.com
If you heard about time management, there is no denying that you knew about “fragmented time” and “block time”, actually, all the time could be divided as fragmented time and block time since these two are opposite definition of time.
Fragmented time means a very short time period in daily life that you could completely control and free to do anything that you want. There are two remarkable features of fragmented time. One is “short”, usually, it covers a time period from only a few minutes to about half an hour. For example, the short time that you wait for someone at dinner; the commute time you take to office and so forth. Another is “many times in a day”, for almost everyone, fragmented time is not just once a day, however, it might be over several times a day, and to put daily fragmented time together, it possibly more than couple of hours. One interesting statistical data I’d like to share with you is that each Chinese spends more than 4 hours on smart phone per day, to exclude the working-related function, it still represents that daily fragmented time is not so “short”.
Block time, obviously, is the other type of time, and the two features of block time is almost reversed compared with fragmented time. The first is “long”, that means, usually it covers a time period from more than half hour to couple of hours. Block time cannot appear repeatedly too many times in a day due to its length. The second is “not free, or, not so free”, block time is related with some daily essential elements in most cases, for example, working, sleeping, dinner, etc., and thus you are not free or not so free in block time. But that doesn’t mean that all the block time is uncontrollable, you can still manage block time to do whatever you want after work.
In time management techniques, fragmented time and block time has been completely divided, and how to use these two different types of time is also completed different. For example, fragmented time is too short to do something which requires your concentration for a while. For example, study, or read some interesting books like fiction, since these things cannot be easily finished separately or in a short time. Another example is that, you don’t need to spare some block time to do something which could be done in fragmented time, such as read some news, pay the credit card bill, otherwise it makes your time inefficient.
In my point of a view, I am not quite agree with the above time management technique, of course, such time management technique is not wrong, I just reckon it could be reinforced based on how you define your time between fragmented one and block one. In my mind, if you just focus on fragmented time and block time in one day, or even you take full use of one day, it means really a little for your life.
What I want to explain is that, if you treat time through a long-term version, one day might be just a “fragmented time” whereas one month might be a “block time”, and then you try your best to manage your daily time based on your life plan. Under such occasion, even if you waste some daily time, your time management is still efficient during assorted of long-run time. It doesn’t mean that the daily time management is not necessary, it’s just not SO indispensable compared with the whole time structure that you “build” based on your life plan.
Last but not least, even if you have already “built” your time schedule, you still could break such schedule to do something freely when you think it’s worthy to do so.
To sum up, given by the definition about “fragmented time” and “block time”, the most efficient way to manage time cannot be simply formatted, it’s different amongst people and depends on how good you know yourself rather than just how good you arrange works to different part of daily time.
