Effective time management

1 _________________ Time flies and if you want to reach your goals, you have to make your days productive, not to plan anything to kill time and remember that time is money. With some effort you can make your days more efficient. They say there’s a place for everything and everything should be in its place. How about your plan? Do you have a plan or strategy for organizing your clock and commitments? With discipline, you can be an effective time manager.

2 _________________ The first step is to make planning a habit. Remember that what can be done anytime is done at no time. Do not focus on one day, focus on the whole week.

3 _________________ Stephen Covey made a masterful illustration using a bucket, some sand, and several rocks of various sizes. He explained that the sand represents all the busy work that we have to do — must-dos. The bucket represents all the time we have for all the demands of our lives. What happens with most of us is that we fill up our buckets with the sand first, and then we can only put a few rocks on top, and there’s no more room for the rest. What he suggested is that we put all our rocks into the bucket first, and then fill in all the available spaces with the sand. And miraculously, everything fits in our container! This is the philosophy you need to employ when you schedule your week. Identify all your big rocks, and block out the time to handle these first. Then worry about the sand afterwards. We have to make sure that we handle the important stuff first, and not let the busy work consume our days.

4 _________________ Don’t plan the every hour of your day and week as it may turn out to be crammed with activities. Leave some time for you to catch up when the unexpected happens. Learn the art of juggling your activities and adapting to unplanned changes.

5 _________________ Learn how to say no. It’s more important than you may think. We have to learn how to say no when it’s needed or else we won’t get anything done. There is a lot of disturbing elements around us.

6 _________________ Once you have your days scheduled, you need to exercise discipline and stick to what you planned. Do everything you can to eliminate distractions and really focus on what you have to do. You will be amazed how much more productive you can be. Remember that procrastination is the thief of time!

7 _________________ Don’t forget to leave sometime for yourself to think, ponder, and for emergencies. If you are going to work for 10 hours, for example, make sure you leave 2 hours for pondering and emergencies. At the end of the day, reassess how your day went. Did you accomplish everything you wanted to do? Was your day beneficial?

A Why Planning Is Necessary

B Who Needs Planning?

C Discipline, Discipline, Discipline

D Be Flexible with Your Time

E The One Word that Can Save You Tons of Time…

F Learn to Prioritize

G Schedule at Least One Week at a Time

H Assess Your Day

Task 4. Compare your working day with the working day of your parents or friends using the ‘Key Language’.

Describe the General State of Events	It’s a matter of fact… It is a fact that…/It is…
Express Your Preferences	I really like/love/enjoy… I find … really fascinating… I prefer … to… If I were to choose I would…
Compare	Compared with… In the same way/manner… Similarly… Likewise…
Contrast	Besides…/However…/In contrast… Naturally…/Nevertheless… Different from…/On the contrary…

7. Dwelling

Task 1. Read the text and fill in the table.

I lived in a big house as a child. It was in the suburbs of Boston, where most houses had a yard, a lawn, a patio and a garden. When I was little, we used to go on holidays to the country and stay in a caravan. In that rural area there were a lot of mobile homes, farms and even houseboats where people lived and spent their holidays. Once we were even invited to a ranch that looked really expensive and seemed like a real villa or a castle to me. Though I’ve never been to a real castle, I enjoyed visiting the Palace of Versailles when we spent our honeymoon in Paris.

In college I lived in the room in the college dormitory, which I shared with two other girls. After the university, when I just started working, I shared a flat or an apartment with my friend. We each had our own bedroom and bathroom and shared a kitchen. Now I live in a townhouse with my husband. It’s a nice duplex (a two-family, semidetached) house. It’s also quite small but it is in a convenient place and we can visit our friends, who live in a condominium (condo) in the modern apartment building. Our friends in Toronto have just moved to a long townhouse, which is also called a terraced house, row house or a linked house.

My grandmother is in a retirement home now but she used to live in a bungalow in the rural area, which I always thought would be quite nice because you don’t ever have to climb any stairs! But when I am older, I think I would like to live in the suburbs in a beautiful white cottage with yellow roses around the door.

Most of our friends love to spend their free time camping, but my least favourite thing to stay in, is most definitely a tent. They are freezing cold and there’s always at least one spider living in them!

Where Has the Author Lived	Places She Visited	Places She Has Never Visited

Task 2. Add to the table the types of dwelling you can meet in the following areas. Tell about the pros and cons of living there using the table.

	Types of Dwelling	Pros of Living There	Cons of Living There
The City/ An Urban Area		Adjectives: bustling, active, modern, futuristic, historic, well-organised. Full range of facilities: shops/ services/ schools/ hospitals, job opportunities, wide variety of entertainment, easy transportation.	Adjectives: noisy, busy, littered, crowded, littered, chaotic. Pollution, high crime rate, fast pace of life, stress, more con­sumerism.
The Suburbs		Adjectives: calm, spacious, green, environmentally-friendly. Community atmosphere, good facilities, ideal for fa­milies.	Adjectives: boring, unfrien­dly, sleepy, dull. Noisy neighbours, far from the city centre, limited en­ter­tain­ment.
Country-side/ A Rural Area		Adjectives: breath-taking, eye-catching, picturesque, tranquil, quiet and peaceful. Slower pace of life, possibility of garden, pleasant environ­ment, relaxing atmosphere.	Adjectives: off the beaten track, dilapidated, neglected, isolated. Lack of facilities/schools/ healthcare, few job opportu­nities, boring.

Task 3. Describe your own experience of living and visiting different places by completing the sentences:

1. I have lived in the places like ____________________________. I find them ____________________________________

2. I have visited such places as ______________________________________. I find them ________________________________

3. I’ve never been to the places like __________________________________.

Task 4. The Interior of the House. Most houses and apartments can be divided into two big zones: the living space and the non-living space. Divide the parts of this space into two categories and fill in the table.

A living room (a sitting room/a lounge/a family room), a bathroom (shower), a lavatory (toilet), a kitchen, a garage, a storage room (box room), an attic, a bedroom, a nursery, a basement (cellar), a dining room (dining area), a study (an office), a recreation room (rumpus room/television room), a loft, stairs, a stair well, a landing, a workshop, a gym, a library.

The Living Space	The Non-living Space

Task 5. Compare living in houses and flats using the table.

	Pros	Cons
Flats	Economical, cheap to heat, easy to clean, comfortable, cosy, low security risk, conveniently located to public places, easy to maintain.	Lack of space, no garden, offer no privacy, difficult to keep big pets, thin walls, noisy neighbours, no indivi­duality.
Houses	Lots of storage space, roomy, offers possibility to show individuality, pleasant surroundings, good investment, can have a garden and keep big pets.	Expensive to maintain, less secure, isolated, costly to heat and to maintain, difficult to clean.

Task 6. Vocabulary Revision. Fill in the table with the italicized words.

To mop, to do, to shovel, to rake, to make, to mow, to clean, to wash, to dry, to vacuum, to polish, to sweep, to dust, to cook, to scrub, to take out/to throw out, to water, to iron.

	A House Chore Verb	Things to Do
1		the floor, the windows
2		the floor, the porch, the steps, the driveway, the pathway
3		the furniture, the ceiling, the window sills
4		a meal
5		the laundry, the dishes
6		the room, the house, the apartment, the windows, the cooker, the oven
7		the dishes, the floor, the windows, the dog
8		the dishes, the surface
9		the furniture, the car
10		the floor, the working surface, the bath, the toilet
11		the carpet, the rug
12		garbage, waste, trash
13		the grass, the potted plants
14		snow
15		the leaves, the weeds, the grass
16		the lawn, the grass
17		the laundry, clothes, curtains
18		the bed

Task 7. Read the text. Match choices (A–G) to (1–5). There are two choices you do not need to use.