You should. If you really don't, it's not a good sign, either for your work or your life. Time management is vital. If your schedule is based on a series of external inputs, how much control over your life do you have?

There are a few very important personal issues about not having time:

1. Responsibilities.

If you're a parent, a carer, or someone with direct family or other ties like that, these responsibilities are unavoidable, and essential, but they can be managed.

Objectively, the idea is to make certain your responsibilities are being properly managed. But you may not have to do that yourself, at least not all the time. If you can find a way of dealing with the kids? taxi service, granny?s needs, and the various help-out services you give others, it's worth doing. The extra few hours are priceless.

Remember, you won't really be happy about this unless you're sure you've got the right mix of people, times and places, so look for good fits of all three. The kids like Mrs. So and So. Granny gets on very well with Mrs. ABCD, and probably understands as well or better than you what you mean by 'busy'. You can do a tradeoff on times with Mr. EFG for that voluntary work you don't want to live without. The in-laws have an idea about sharing the load; might even work, and the times could help.

Never take time for granted, particularly under these conditions. You have very little margin for error, even when things are getting done well, if something else arrives on your plate.

Spare time is a very valuable asset. Make sure you either have, or can make, some spare time.

2. Domestic stuff

A house or apartment, with kids, can be a lifetime job of itself. What's wrong with that is that it can also shut down literally everything else. If you find yourself doing enormous amounts of cleaning, cooking, or other domestic jobs, you need better methods. Start limiting the amount of time you spend on things like this. If you give yourself an hour to do something, the first thing that will happen is that you?ll change your approach.

Get hardnosed about how you get things done. If someone else can do things, let them. It might even cost a bit, but not as much as a job. Laundries, drycleaners, grocery deliveries, decent takeaway food, use anything that saves time. Whatever is cluttering up the day can be offloaded, and while you're trying to look for work, they should be.

It may not be the 'homemaker' approach, it depersonalizes some things you might prefer to do yourself. But it's practical, it's quick, and it gets a lot of time and space instantly available. Whatever the domestic environment, the priorities have got scrambled.

Now, you can return the favor to yourself, and use the job to simplify some of the domestic issues. You can buy things that don't have to be cleaned every five seconds, like a new kitchen, a new dishwasher, etc.

3. Health reasons.

This is pretty common these days, and if you're in treatment for anything, or on medication, you need to approach using your time objectively, one step at a time.

Important: whatever the situation, do things as you become able to do them, when you're feeling up to it. Don't push yourself at all, until you've got a bit of strength to handle things.

Depression?s a case in point about the personal relationship with time. Depression tends to blur time. Things are hazy, unfocused. Putting two actions together can be a curse, because you're readjusting. In a sense you're relearning yourself. Remember, it is a physical condition. It's actually quite like training, but it's subtler.

I've had depression, so this is a tale from the trenches. If you've just started on medication, your time is better spent reorienting yourself. Don't hit yourself with extra demands, yet.

When you're a bit more sure of things, start focusing on what you can get done. Do this at your own speed. Don't get drawn into situations until you're ready. Make that clear, too, you're not feeling up to whatever it is, whatever, but you have to be reasonably confident before taking on extra situations.

In terms of job seeking, a bit of forward planning is involved. If you've been told to steer clear of stress, sales and those sorts of frenzied work situations will have to be avoided. You can use time very productively here, in a career sense, to start mapping out courses of approach.

What stinks? What are things you've always preferred to do/not do? See what I mean, there's a range of worthwhile targets here. You may also find some important opportunities, which you'd have missed if your time was being used in other ways. Gathering and assessing information takes time.

If you're convalescing after a work related accident, or a combination of a lost job and a medical condition, the 'depression' approach works well. Your time usage might lead to a better job, for one thing.

Time allows you to maneuver and manipulate your environment. That's why it's so important that time is available, so you can do the thinking, as much as the physical components involved.

4. Job seeking timewasters, jobs that waste time

This is about not having time because you've committed time in advance. That can be the worst possible use of time, and needs some detail:

Some jobs aren't jobs. If you're in work that's consuming time but not paying back, you're wasting time. People usually learn fast enough, and bail out, but time has been lost. In some cases, these non-jobs can devour time, months of it, and for little or no result except annoyance. The effect is ?unemployment by other means?, and it's destructive. While doing these things, you can miss better quality jobs, and even lose money.

The remedy is using time to check things out before getting sucked in to timewasters. Time is an effective quality control for these pests. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen something that looked good, and turned out to be garbage. The only time I didn't spend a few minutes checking things out more thoroughly, I ran straight into a phishing scam. Fortunately I got through OK, but that was as much luck as judgment.

Rule of thumb is if a job isn't paying regularly, it's not worth it. You can usually see the duds coming. No salary quoted, any mention of commission, more hype than content, it all adds up to a non-job.

These things can be hard to spot. Sometimes people pay up front, and they get dragged in because they've made a commitment. Franchises, in particular, are tricky. They can also be expensive. The most expensive I've ever heard is $9000 for a licensed job, in the gaming industry.

Have a look at this for a dialog:

?What are the likely earnings??

?We?re not really allowed to say, and they do vary, quite a lot. Some people are making good money, but you can't realistically just give a figure.?

In this case, that answer is perfectly true. That's also the law, no speculation on earnings from an investment. If he?d answered with a guaranteed income, I'd have hung up on him. He played by the rules, but others don't.

So an outlay of $9000 for what? I was in no position to judge, and left it alone. The only way I would have been persuaded would have been with some baseline turnover figures, payments to franchisees, audited accounts etc, but either he didn't think of that, or that information wasn't available. Neither of which points to a good risk.

You see where the time factor comes in, and that was a legitimate operation. Many of them are sales operations, selling franchises, rather than business. The danger was convincing myself of an income stream, and talking myself into that situation.

I'd also have been committing a lot of time, six hours a day, to something that might never have paid. Between the outlay and the time loss, I'd have had a good chance of losing both ways.

Checking it out was more valuable than the job itself was likely to be.

That's what time?s for. Use it that way, and you're a lot safer.