A great man once said that time is an illusion, lunchtime, double, but despite the elusive nature of these two things, time certainly looks like something that is constantly slipping through our fingers, at least that's why we're wasting so much of it. Yes, many of us seem to feel at least some guilt over things like scrolling through Netflix or browsing the best memes, or refreshing Instagram. It happens. Post in the last 30 seconds.
Although it also indicates how much time we spend wasting on things that do not cause much guilt, it seems appropriate to take too many commitments and have overly busy schedules where we are thin and stressed. Outside, and produces low-quality work as a result.
As Francis Crick once said, busy life is a waste of life. Let’s take a comprehensive approach to time management and give you five useful tips for managing your time more effectively, you already know that you are wasting it because you are a sofa potato. Or you, to be honest like me, reduce yourself to thinking that you are already performing very well because of how busy you are. Let's see.
1. Tracking tool
The first tip I found for you is to use a time tracking tool. This app will help you to do the task listed in many different options in this category. I'm going to recommend you to give it a try at least once, and it's Toggle. Unlike automatic time trackers like rescue time, Toggle is a manual time tracker that logs the time you spend on every app or program on your computer and then reports it to you at the end of the week, so you can actually go to their dashboard and record it. The time you spend on every task throughout the day.
My suggestion to at least try this tool is that tracking your time manually will make it harder for you to think about it and you will start to get a more accurate feel of how you spend your time on a daily basis. And it lets you make changes later. In the toggle dashboard, you will find two different modes, manual mode, and timer mode.
With manual mode, you can record the time spent on each task after the fact, but I recommend using timer mode instead. This is the real-time mode, where you can complete your task in real-time when you press the Start and Stop button. It has some major advantages. First, it's more accurate because you are tracking time in real-time. You do not have to be behind the facts and try to remember how many hours and minutes you put into each task and secondly, and most importantly, there are chances of wasting your time or changing tasks. Chances are low because your subconscious wants your time log to accurately reflect what you really did.
Manual time tracking is not for everyone, for many hours like eating a bowl of nails in the morning. After you do this for a week or two, you may find that you want to move on without worrying about it anymore, and it's good, but as an experiment, I found it to take a week or two later. Doing this is very useful because it gives you a more accurate picture of how you are using your time and makes you think a little more about how you are going to use it in the future.
2. Clear on Priorities
Another is to be clear about your preferences and do it very thoughtfully, perhaps sit down and do it on a piece of paper or write in your journal when you are not clear on your preferences and what do they represent on your schedule, it is very easy to accept too many commitments and become a person who is overly busy. I realized that giving priority is the point of this article, but I want to give you a few questions that I ask myself whenever I'm trying to narrow down my personal preferences and whether a new commitment is worth it.
For asking a very extensive question. How would my schedule be without it? The answer is to ask about your own current list of commitments, like my schedule, how much free time I have, and whether I am willing to give anything for this new commitment. In addition to that question, I would like to ask another bird-eye question, when it's on my deathbed, do I regret not doing so?
This is the question that drives you to learn the lessons that really interest you. This may be a useful question to work on overcoming your fears, but as a time management question, it can be very useful. Helps you from the point of view of life values, helps to prioritize things from the bird's point of view. If you want to be really clear about your preferences and your values and what you are doing, it is also helpful to keep a written record of what you are doing during this time and to update it frequently.
3. Label Your Task
Tip number three is to learn how to batch your tasks effectively, and batching basically just means taking a bunch of your tasks, bundling them together, and knocking them all out in one session. When you do this, you free up lots of time for more intense projects later on, but more importantly, batching lets you take advantage of economies of scale. When you decide to do a bunch of tasks in one big batch, you end up with a lot of setup costs you'll have to deal with if you do them all individually. In terms of tasks that make good candidates for batching, I'm gonna go ahead and suggest
a. Number one, any and all errands. If it's a low-energy task, and you have to leave the house to do it, go ahead and take care of all those in one big batch in one afternoon.
b. Number two, tasks that require low mental energy and that are done at home so cleaning things up, organizing papers, fighting that ninja that's hiding in your closet, clearing out your email box, all that kind of stuff.
c. Number three, any kind of small tasks that surround your main work. For example here, every single time you do any project, You must create a project over in Notion mention tag and deadline date, and also you must research document in Evernote. These are little tasks that could be done individually when you start the project, or you could come up with 10 projects in a row and do all of these things in one big batch.
One little tidbit before we move on if you're already using a to-do list or a similar task manager, You can start using their label feature as it can be very helpful for batching because, in all your projects, you can apply labels that match your energy level like low or medium or high or the place where works have to be performed like home or work or a chore, and then when you have time to batch, you can look at the label that's most relevant to you right now and see what's to be done.
4. Learn to Say No
Next, we have to talk about how to get better at saying no. This is an integral skill in time management, especially for people who are overly busy. Those of us who are perpetually overcommitted seem to be the kind of people who just can't say no to new opportunities, whether there are people coming to us because they want something from us, they want our help, or whether it's something that just seems really cool that we want to do.
Either way, we have to learn how to say no if we wanna be able to prioritize the things that are actually important and give them the time that they deserve. How exactly do you get to the point where you can say no? There are definitely tactics, there are ways to gracefully let people down, there are ways to sort of push off things that you might wanna do for yourself, but I think the first thing you have to do is just become mentally okay with saying no, and this can be hard.
A lot of times saying no feels like letting an opportunity slip through your fingers forever like you're only gonna get one shot because this opportunity only comes once in a lifetime. Remember that every time you say yes to an opportunity, you are incurring an opportunity cost because the act of saying yes to one thing means you are implicitly saying no to something else.
You have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention, and you can't devote it to everything. This can be a useful way to reshape your thinking. Remember that every single decision you make incurs an opportunity cost. That brings us to the question of how to properly let people down if you have to say no because there is a graceful way to do it and there is a frictionless way of doing it.
You could just yell no and why would you ever ask me to do that in their face, but you could also do it a bit more tactfully, Let's take an example you are a public speaker, an influencer who makes videos on youTube, etc. One type of opportunity that you can deliberately choose to say for the most part is public speaking. This is something that you can do. It definitely can advance your career, but you've realized that if you travel, if you speak, if you take time to write talks, You can't make as many videos and I can't do the other things that are valuable to you.
Nine times out of 10, when somebody reaches out to you wanting you to speak at their school or their event, If you have to say no. Your priorities dictate it, but you try to say it in a way that respects the fact that they even reached out to you that says that you are honored that they did so and that tells them you have other commitments right now. You are not saying 'No' directly because you don't want to do it. But you have done it because you have other priorities that you have to respect.
You could also take it one step further by trying to anticipate their next step and then trying to help out with that. If somebody comes to you with an opportunity, and you have to say no, it's likely that they're gonna have to go to somebody else or look elsewhere for a solution since you can't provide it. If you have anything that you could do quickly, again, that doesn't interfere with your priorities or take too much time, then anticipating that need of theirs and trying to fill it is going to help them along in their process, but it's also going to make this interaction a positive one even though you had to say no.
To go back to my previous example, if you get a speaking request, and you have to say no to it, you have to do so gracefully, you have to inform them as to why, but you might also follow that up with a recommendation that they contact your friend he does take speaking gigs, he's really good at it, and his area of expertise is pretty similar to yours. Even though you had to say no, you might've been able to provide them with a solution. This practice, the practice of anticipating the needs of the other person when you say no or anticipating the next step in the conversation, is a very, very useful life skill to build, so don't think of it just as a time management tip, think of it as a life tip in general.
5. Create Deadline
The time management tip is to use the pressure created by deadlines to your advantage. A few years ago, I had to learn the hard way just how useful deadlines are and how terrible for your productivity a lack of them can be.
A very valuable lesson is that you need structure, you need deadlines, you need a bit of a framework to operate within. Otherwise, you just don't do anything. You take the path of the least resistance. There may be some rare souls out there who are so passionate about every single element of what they do that they require absolutely no structure, no time limit, nothing at all. They just get up and work like a mad man every single day, but you don't become out of those people.
You don't need to love every single element of it and become prone to procrastination unless you have a deadline. It's like the ex-Navy Seal Jock Willink always likes to say, discipline equals freedom. When you have a little discipline, when you have a little framework, you're able to work within it, have fewer decisions to make, and you have a bit of time pressure to get your work done. Is. It actually gives you more free time overall.
If you work for yourself or your student who has a lot of free time, a lot of kinds of flexibility with your homework, I would encourage you to set some deadlines. Maybe make some mini-goals within your task management system. Give yourself a bit of time pressure.
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