Time - How to Use it Wisely to Accomplish your Goals

You have 24 hours in a day and a list of things to accomplish that seems overwhelming. Sound familiar? Join the club; we all are trying to fit 30 hours worth of work into 24 hours. Maybe you’ve found it doesn’t work. We can’t manage time any more than we can manage the weather. We can’t save it for a ‘rainy day’, to pull out and come back to when… we have more time!

So, the only true solution is to learn how to manage yourself and your actions to make the most out of your 24 hours AND the years in your life. Yes, your life. When I put it that way, it sounds pretty scary, huh? Are you wasting your time? Here are some tips to help you use that precious time wisely.

1. Plan your days/weeks. No matter how busy you are, time spent planning will help you make the best use out of that time. If you are very busy, this is essential in order to accomplish a great deal in that finite amount of time. Get into the habit of going over your schedule for the next day the night before. Set it into your head so you have at least a rough picture of what your day will look like. Review your schedule, appointments, what materials you will need and then write down your task list for the day to help you be even more productive. This will help you wake up and hit the ground running without questions or concerns.

2. Perform maintenance on your calendar every week. Schedules and appointments change almost daily. You may have notes or reminders for a change that is in the future, but with the busyness of the day, you forget to update your calendar. Getting into the habit of weekly maintenance will prevent skipped meetings or appointments and help ease your mind to trust your calendar.

3. Work on what’s important first. This has to do with prioritizing. As you look at your tasks for the day and for the week, number which ones should be done first and plan them into your schedule for that day. Putting this down on paper will help remove distractions and help you stay on that particular goal.

4. Build flexibility into your schedule. You have a great schedule put together, then someone is late or there is more traffic than you expected. If you have built buffer time into your schedule, events such as this won’t throw your entire day into chaos.

5. Handle decisions as quickly as possible. Many of my clients are excellent analysts; they have to mull things over… to death. Regardless of the decision; how to handle a piece of paper, an invitation to a networking event, a request for a donation, deciding quickly without putting it off for later will get the item out of your head and off your plate, allowing you to concentrate on more important things. Delaying decisions just adds to that full plate and you’re going to have to handle that decision at some time, so why not deal with it right now rather than later?

6. Delegate. This is a hard one for growing companies. They stress over the cost of hiring someone to do non-core tasks. However, delegating such tasks to someone else will open you up to create more programs and services and allow you to do the things you like to do to increase your income!

7. Group similar activities together. Grouping similar activities will help you get into a rhythm. Imagine a typical day involves writing several items – perhaps the script for an upcoming workshop, an article, a post into your weekly blog, and a chapter in your book. But you also have phone calls to make, bookkeeping to update and reading to do. Grouping all the similar activities together will help you stay focused on those activities and you will be much more productive than if you wrote a chapter in your book, stopped and updated your bookkeeping, then read one of your journals for updating, then did some filing. The mind tends to scatter and not be able to focus as clearly.

8. Use every 5 minutes of every day. Yikes! Think about it; do you really have the luxury of having large chunks of time to work on projects? Unlikely. If you become aware of, and start using, the small pieces of time, you will get more done in a day than you can imagine! As you sit and read this, stop right now and look at the clock. Take note of the time. Then finish this article and look at the clock again. How much time has passed? It’s passing you by at this very moment!

So, now you have some great tips to make the most out of the most precious resource you have, time. Time to stop reading and start making things happen!