How to Manage Your Time
The key to managing your time isn’t just about your ability to organize your day to be most productive or to accomplish everything on your to do list; it’s ability to do so without feeling completely depleted and exhausted by end of the day—and that’s a big difference. In this post, I will share a practical guide to create a solid strategy to manage your time on a regular basis.
If you want to learn to manage your time, first you need to know how you spend your time.
Track how you spend your time for a week.
The goal is to understand what takes up the majority of your time throughout the day and where you can make improvements.
How to track? This depends upon your lifestyle, your work schedule and how distracted you are. The more distraction you experience during the day, the shorter time tracking intervals will be.
Some of us can get very distracted with the phone, messages, social media, news scrolling and not realize that by end of the day it may add up to HOURS of unproductive time; as a result, you bring your work home, which takes away your evening time from personal activities or time with family. And you get stuck in this wheel.
Some of us get so tired by the evening and decide indulge in TV or screen time, that weekday evenings may be completely unproductive and house chores, for example, fall onto the weekend—which will you make you feel that all you do on the weekend is clean, organize, do household chores, and less meaningful things.
Why track for a week? I recommend to track for a week to see a comprehensive picture of how you spend your time; the way we spend our time on Monday may be different than on a Friday, and on the weekend. Life events that happen during the week will also impact how you spend your time. If you aren’t able to track for one week, do what works for you.
Track Your Time:
Sample Tracking Sheet
Now that you have done this exercise and know how you spend your time, let’s figure out how to manage your time.
When is the most unproductive time for you?
For example, you may find that when you wake up, you spend an hour on your phone, or up to 2 hours on the phone in the evening before going to bed, catching up on social media, texting, reading etc. If you work remotely, you may notice you get distracted a lot throughout the day. Your goal is to re-prioritize your unproductive time into focused time.
Add structure to your day.
How do you do that? By introducing habits and routines. Break your day into three parts—morning/afternoon/evening –and ask yourself: What’s the goal for each? This way you will prioritize what needs to be accomplished first. Watch my video on Why You Need to Create Habits & Routines Video and How to Build Routines Video to help you better manage your time.
Prioritize most important tasks & prioritize “me-time”
Prioritize most important tasks. To ensure that the most important things get done for the day, put them at the top of your list.
Prioritize having your own time (me-time). What does this mean? When we have lot to do—our job, taking care of kids, household chores, grocery shopping, paying bills, etc. —it’s easy to put yourself last on that list. No wonder, at the end of the day, you feel tired, exhausted and yet, your list isn’t even done. The problem is your prioritized everyone else but yourself. In order for you to have enough energy to manage each and every day, you need to put gas in your tank (or charge your own battery).
What do you do daily to charge your own battery? Please take a minute to think about this. You might even say “I don’t have the time!” If you constantly give, you are running on empty and that’s why life becomes overwhelming, you are stressed, angry and not managing things well.
Where can you be more efficient with your time?
What can you do during the day that can help you be more efficient, i.e. be more productive with minimal wasted effort. Below are a few examples of how to improve efficiency:
If you have a zoom meeting, can you walk (get an exercise) and listen to the meeting?
If you work remotely, can you do a load of laundry in between?
If you work remotely, can you take 5 min break to vacuum the floor? Put the dishes away?
When you are doing the dishes, can you listen to a podcast, watch a video, etc.?
Take 10 mins in the morning or in the evening to clean up/organize one room in the house. Ten mins may not seem like a big deal, but it adds up; by the end of the week, your house may be tidier.
If you have kids, involve the entire family into 5 min clean up time before bed.
If you have an hour break for lunch, can you exercise for 20-30 mins, and use the other half to eat lunch?
If you receive a lot of messages throughout the day, set aside time to reply to them on your break/at a later time.