Learn Better Time Management

Kids running around, piles of left over work stuff on your dining room table, 5 loads of laundry to do, and dinner to cook. And you want me to have time for my husband? I’m supposed to find time to go the gym/ meditate/ whatever the young kids are doing these days that claims to give you wholeness. Well I just don’t have the time in the day for all this? Do you know how much stuff I have to do?

Child, please.

These are the cries of so many of our tired souls today. We all have the same 24 hours in the day, but how do some people manage to do so much in a day, and not completely collapse from exhaustion. I mean, I just don’t get it? Sound familiar?

Well the answer, my friend, is time management. Yes. Time management.

Too often, we get settled into a certain lifestyle. Our routine becomes so familiar and repetitive to us, we don’t even notice how much time we could be saving between tasks if we just take the time to sit down and manage our time. So the question is…How can I manage my time better?

Well I’ve provided some time management tips, that will get you on your way to effectively managing your time. Thank me later😉.

Great Tips for Effective Time Management:

1. Learn To Delegate -er uh- SHARE

If you have kids, they can learn some responsibility if they haven’t been doing chores thus far. It’s good for their preparation for the work world. Figure out a new system to rotate

household tasks/chores amongst your children, or see if there is anything your partner will be willing to help you with. If they can’t necessarily do the task itself, see if you can ask them to pay closer attention to the way they live, to make all of your lives easier.

So for instance, if you spend 20 minutes collecting everybody’s laundry before you do a load, ask everybody to go ahead and put their own dirty clothes in separate bins everyday. That way you don’t have to collet it, and you don’t have to separate the colors. It’s done for you and you can save you time right there.

If you know that it takes you 30 minutes to do the dishes, ask everyone to soak their dishes when they put them in the sink, so when you get to the task, it doesn’t require all the extra effort of scrubbing. All the grime will slide off, making our dish washing experience effortless and much, much less time consuming 😊.

See how that works?

Last example is for work. If your boss has a ridiculous expectation for you to complete all your tasks for the day, you can help yourself by REALLY working as a team member. So what I mean by this, is, if you have coworkers that share the same kinds of tasks, and all of you are competent in the same stuff you guys can work together to get everything done faster. So let’s say you are really fast at managing the books, and Susie is fastest at recording all the customer complaints…work together to get the tasks done faster. Ask Susie if she can take half of your customer complaint file, and you take half of her clients bookkeeping. That way both of you will be done faster with your tasks for the day. Run this by your boss of course, but I don’t see why it would be a problem if you both have to get the stuff done, and are both competent in it. Trading or sharing a workload is less stressful on everyone, and utilizing everyone’s individual skill set for the benefit of the team is the smart way to work, not the hard way.

2. Identify Time Wasters

Start looking at what you do all day, and write it down. Write down what you do on a day to day basis, and how much time it usually takes you to do it. 9 times out of 10, you will realize that there are things you can eliminate from your daily routine, entirely. You just never sat down to think about how much time it is wasting out of your day.

Are you spending 2 hours scrolling through social media, or through emails? Social media can get so out of hand so quick. It’s like you enter another world, and come out hours later, not even realizing how much time has actually passed. Start giving yourself time blocks for social media. If you realize that you can’t seem to get through what you want to look at in 30 minutes or so, see if you can do it while doing another tasks. Can you look at it while you’re working out? Treadmill scrolling? Walking and surfing? Can you do it when you take your dog out in the morning? Can you do look at it on your morning commute (New Yorkers on the train). Find another way to do what you enjoy, while getting something else done. This leads us to another tip…

3. Chunk some tasks together

When it comes to tasks that don’t require intense concentration, like work tasks, or school work…do two tasks at once. Workout while your watching TV. Help your kids with their homework while you are doing laundry.

4. Start the Day With A To Do List

Write down the things you have to do for the day, and order them in sections. What MUST BE DONE TODAY goes at the top of the list, obviously. What can be done over the next few days, if not done today? Then put the least important tasks at the end. Those would be the tasks that don’t require a lot of mental effort, and can be chunked together with other tasks, in hopes that they can get done. If it doesn’t get done today, learn to let it go. Write a list of what’s left over at the end of the day, to start tomorrow’s list with, and leave it for tomorrow with no worry😊. This leads us to our next tip…

5. Shut Down When You Need To

Stop running well into the night doing things that can wait until tomorrow. This is the importance of to do lists. They keep your tasks on your radar, without you having to sleep with anxiety, worrying about what you didn’t get to today. As long as you handled the most important things today, go to sleep. Get an adequate amount of rest.

When you don’t rest enough, or you live your days with stress from the chaotic disorganization in your life, it takes longer for you to do things. It’s harder to focus, and you are more tired, so it likely leaves you completing tasks at a much slower rate than you would if you were well rested.

This also applies to all those overtime hours at work. Refer back to the 1st tip about task sharing and delegation (if you can delegate). Then, if you are prioritizing your tasks like you should, at the end of the work day, you shouldn’t be spending hours after work everyday, trying to catch up on tasks that can wait until tomorrow. I know that overtime pay looks nice when you get your check, but it doesn’t look nice to your kids, partner, or friends, when you continuously neglect their needs because you are working late. So consider the benefits of managing your time better. It adds such a quality of life, when you have more time to do the things you love to do, and not that you HAVE to do. Capiche’?

6. Learn Assertion

Some things really don’t require your effort, time, or presence, but you do them anyway. Think about that long discussion after the staff meeting, that does not apply to you. You sit there to be polite, or because you feel obligated…wasting time. Why don’t you shoot a quick “do you still need me”, to your boss or coworker. They likely will continue their in depth conversation on their own, and leave you be to go and complete your work. 30 minutes, saved. Yes!

Also learn to say NO.

Devoting yourself to so many things because you don’t know how to say no, takes up so much time and energy. So think about when you truly, have something to do, and you have to tell your friend or your husband you can’t because of a work thing. Stop feeling so obligated to have a VALID reason to say no. Learn to say, I’m sorry, I have too much going on, I can’t. Just because you don’t have something going on at that moment, doesn’t mean you don’t have too much going on. So technically, that statement is true. You need to rest. Or you might have some other things of less importance to take care of, but forcing yourself to go to this event, or go shopping with your girlfriend, because you can’t say no is just a time waster. It pushes back everything else you have to do, when it doesn’t have to.

I mean if you truly want to do it, by all means, enjoy! But if it isn’t really something you want to do, or you feel like you should do it out of obligation, you need to learn to assert yourself. Say no, because you need that time for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that. With all this new time you’ll gain from managing your time, you’ll have some extra free time to catch up with the person you turned down, if you want.

7. Focus

So, notice I said earlier that you can chunk some tasks together. Emphasize the doesn’t-require-intense-concentration part. Things that require your full attention, should not be multi-tasked. I know if feels like you are getting more done when you multi-tasks like this, but it actually slows you down to try and concentrate on two things like this at the same time. Give your full attention to one task, and give yourself a time block to get it done, and then move on to the next task, with your full attention. Multi-tasking tires your mind quicker, and drains you of more energy. That means your more likely to make errors that you’ll have to go back and fix, or pay for later. You also won’t produce as well as you would, if you focused on one task at a time. Like I said, give yourself a certain amount of time to complete that task, which motivates you to power through it, instead of drag your feet and get on to the next thing.

And those are the best tips for managing your time better. If you can’t get your time managed based on these tips, then you might just need professional help. Lol, that’s okay. That’s what I’m here for. You can always email me if you have a special case, like unruly ass precious kids or something like being a caregiver makes you feel like you have no way to move your time around. I can definitely help you with it. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I promise I’ll help you figure it out, no matter what the case is. I dare you to stump me!

Much love and luck with your new time adventures 😊,

The [BOG].

#focus #timemanagement #rest #relax #help #time #lifecoach #change