Introduction to the Personal Software Process

7 Managing Your Time

This chapter describes time budgets and shows you how to use them. It explains how to make a time budget and suggests some approaches to meeting them. For the chapter assignment, you will make a time budget.

7.1 Elements of Time Management

So far in this course, you have measured the way you spent time over several weeks. You now have a modest amount of data and a pretty good idea how long it takes to do various tasks. This knowledge was not hard to get, and by now you can see how helpful these data can be for making future plans. In this chapter, you will use these data to manage your time as follows:

1. Decide how you want to spend your time.

2. Make a time budget.

3. Track the way you spend time against this budget. ...