Managing ones time is the most important thing to work on throughout ones career. It is not just about how effective you are at work but also how you balance your time to be with your family, friends and other personal activities.
To tackle time management you need to start with a focus on establishing a cadence for setting your goals and updating them on a yearly basis. This should include both your professional as well as personnel goals. This will ensure that you maintain a balance in your life.
A balanced life will enable you to be better balanced at handling the ups and downs in life. If you are off balanced and something goes wrong in the area that you spend the most amount of your time then your whole world will come crashing down. When you are balanced you can absorb these ups and downs and continue growing at a fast rate.
So to start improving upon how you use your time, I developed the attached spreadsheet, with a mentee, to help you see how much time there actually is in a day and you can use it as a guide to balance out your time to achieve your personal and professional goals.
You will be amazed by how much time you actually have to work with in any given week – for example – there are 168 hours in a week, if you deduct 7 hours a day for sleep you have 119 hours. Then deduct the weekends for family time and you still have 85 hours left. Even further give yourself 5 hours a day to spend on personal activities and that still leaves you with a 60 hour work week. There are plenty of hours in a day, this exercise is designed to help you use your time more effectively.
Start out by figuring out where you spend your time today. I would recommend documenting a couple of weeks so that you can get a clear picture. Then write down your goals to where you would like to be. You then use the delta to put together a change plan – in essence, what will you do differently going forward to enable you to achieve these goals.
Managing ones time is not something you do once and you’re done. It is something that you will work on every day for the rest of your life. If used correctly it will be amazing to see what you will be able to accomplish.
Time, it’s what you make of it… Good luck!
Related articles
- Time Management Tips For People Who Do Too Much (forbes.com)
- 7 Ways To Manage Time Effectively At Work (amanagrawalblog.wordpress.com)
- How to find time to manage it all (TimeManagementMagazine.com)
