Do you feel like you’re always playing catch-up?
You often find yourself saying, “I just don’t have time.”
You’re probably juggling a full-time job or business, family, personal responsibilities, and pressure to pursue goals.
You may see people who make it look easy, they seem to have it all together.
There’s even a temptation to write them off as anomalies, “They must have been born that way”
But deep down… you know you can do better…
You know you have the potential; you’re just missing a key piece of information or a new skill to unlock it.
Maybe you’ve already started to improve your time management, but your habits are still off.
That’s why you’re reading this blog. 🙂
And that’s why I’m writing it. <3
I’ve been through the exact same struggles, and to be quite frank, I still catch myself wishing there were more hours in the day. But I’ve come a long way and I’m here to tell you, from experience, you can take control of your life.
Not only can you take control of your life, it’s critically important that you do.
Let me say it for emphasis…It is critically important that you take control of your life.
If you don’t seize control, you simply live life on a whim. Fluttering from thing to thing…
No intent or direction, just a feather in the wind.
But that’s not how anything great was ever built.
The person online who’s your Instagram inspo didn’t get an awesome body or that amazing life just by hoping things would work out; it was very purposeful and planned.
How you spend your time determines everything in your life.
You never get more of it…
Your time is the most valuable asset you have and truly the only asset you own in life.
Once you spend it, it’s gone.
So, if you want success, you must ensure that you’re investing your time in the activities that yield the greatest returns.
This blog presents 5 of the most critical time management tips that you must master if you want to maximize your success…
But the first step to managing and investing your time is to believe that you can manage your time.
Who Controls Your Time?
This is a genuine question.
Sure, you may have a boss and parents, or little humans…
But ultimately, you make the decision whether to show up for work or attend that family gathering.
There’s a quote:
“In any given moment, you are doing what you most want to be doing.”
Think about it…when you skip the gym, it’s not because you didn’t have time; you made the conscious decision, “The gym is not my highest priority right now; this other thing is.”
That may sound harsh, and I’m not trying to make you feel bad about your decision, I promise.
Cuz sometimes, you’re gonna have to skip the gym… and that’s ok.
Instead, I’m trying to put you behind the steering wheel of your life.
We must take responsibility for every moment we waste and every moment we win.
We all have 24 hours each day…
And for good or for bad, it’s our choice which buckets we pour it into and how we prioritize it: work, family, friends, hobbies, scrolling on social media…
Since you’re reading this blog, I assume you’re not satisfied with your current results…
So if you’re ready and willing to put in the work to start taking control of your life, to stop leaving things to chance, and to build the outcomes you desire, keep on reading…
Here are my 5 most important time management tips.
How do you manage your time effectively? (5 Time Management Tips)
Conduct a Time Audit
Self-inspection time.
The first step to improving how you manage your time is to analyze how you’re truly spending it.
First, take 1 day and just record what you do every hour.
From getting ready in the morning, driving, reading emails, scrolling social media, having conversations…
Everything.
It may sound a bit neurotic and crazy, and it is :)…
Cuz to get crazy improvement, you have to do things that may seem crazy. Plus it’s only for 1 day.
At the end of the day, go through your notes with a fine tooth comb and consider what activities actually helped you move towards your life goals.
What is truly moving the needle?
Where are you losing time?
Where could you change things to gain time?
A common issue is that people get caught up in a lot of menial tasks that make them feel productive. But, by the time they complete them all, it’s near the end of the day, and they haven’t made much progress on the things that will truly move the needle.
By performing this close inspection, you will realize how much time you’re wasting in the day and reveal the true amount of time you have to work with.
Prioritize and Win
Think about this…
Hard work alone is not enough.
You can blast out infinite “work,” but it won’t get you what you want if it’s not directed properly.
It’s like going 100 miles per hour in the wrong direction.
Instead, by properly prioritizing your tasks, you can ensure that the most critical and urgent tasks are completed first.
A good first step to properly aiming your attention is a method called “The Daily Highlight,” sourced from a book called “Make Time”
Essentially, the night before, determine the one task you really need to complete for tomorrow.
This will be your guiding light.
Deciding your daily highlight helps you focus your attention every day on the most critical things first.
Now, you may be saying, “Only one task per day?”
Yes, pick one core task you absolutely want to get done, and then after that, you can give yourself a bit more leeway to complete your remaining tasks.
Be careful not to go too far and let one task bleed into your whole day. According to Parkinson’s Law, a task tends to expand and fill the time you allot for it.
So, to supercharge your Daily Highlight, actually block out time on your calendar for the task and stick to it!
Implementing your daily highlight almost guarantees that your most important tasks will be completed.
Plus, when you do complete your highlight, it gives you a small sense of accomplishment since you completed something that you deemed so important.
The Daily Highlight is a great way to build momentum for the rest of your day.
Imagine… after one year, if every single day you ensured that you completed the most important task.
That’s 365 important tasks DONE.
Where would you be?
Focus on One Thing at a Time
“Doing Everything and Getting Nothing Done“
In a world where infinite sources vying for our attention pull us in 80 directions at once, it’s easy to spread our attention so thin that we cannot dedicate a significant effort to anything or anyone.
A simile I like to think about is our attention and time as the light from the sun.
The sun shines on everything outside. Because it’s spread out and diffused, it takes a significant amount of time in direct sun for you to get burnt.
But if you were like me as a kid, when you take a magnifying glass and catch the sunlight at the right angle, you can concentrate the light into a powerful beam that you can use to burn through all kinds of things.
Our attention and time are just the same. If you continually swap your focus, jumping from task to task, you will never get into a flow state and make real progress on your task.
Every time our brain switches attention, it requires us to regain context and essentially resets our flow state.
If you can focus your attention, you can quickly and more efficiently burn through tasks, just like magnified sunlight.
You can literally become a force of nature.
How to Perform Life-Changing Focus Sessions.
So how do we catch and concentrate our focus, you may be asking…
An easy way to do this is simply pick a small chunk of work and set a timer.
“I’m going to spend 15 minutes researching” or “5 minutes to write this email”
Once you’ve practiced training your focus, you can build up and set even larger timers, up to an hour or 90 minutes of straight, focused, deep work on a single task.
This is where the real results come from.
If you’re anything like me, these focus sessions will be a challenge that initially causes you discomfort.
I’m telling you now: you’re going to hit roadblocks in your work, and you may feel the urge to metaphorically run away by opening your phone and checking your notifications or scrolling on social media, but you have to try your best to fight the urge and overcome those first few struggles.
After you beat the urge to look at your phone or do something else, the focused work will become much easier and even enjoyable.
When you’re in the flow state, time flies, your brain operates at peak efficiency, and the clouds in your mind part and the beauty of your mind can shine.
Achieving that flow state is ONLY possible if you eliminate distractions, so I highly recommend putting your phone in a completely different room or similar harder-to-reach location to help discourage yourself from grabbing it out of habit.
In the beginning, it’s actually interesting to observe how much you instinctively reach for your phone when you hit a mental roadblock or crave a hit of dopamine..
It’s like a pacifier for your mind.
BONUS: Break Time!
Make sure you give yourself a quick refreshing break between focused sessions (5 – 20 minutes), depending on the length of your focus session.
Again, try to avoid your phone and social media. They are not breaks for your brain. Social media captures your attention and drains your brain of it’s mental energy.
Instead, drink some water, grab a healthy snack or meal, step outside for some fresh air, or maybe have a casual conversation. Just the same as any physical training, rest and recovery is key.
Learn to Say “No” to Distractions…
And Say “Yes” to YOUR Future
Time is our most valuable asset.
So why not protect it?
Learning to say “No” is the first line of defense against the low-priority task gremlins that steal your precious time right from under your nose.
How many times have you had plans for the day that totally fell through due to constant interruptions and distractions?
Here’s a realistic example (It may sound familiar)
Let’s say you set a 2-hour work session for yourself…
You get started, and it takes 15 minutes to get in the groove…
You get 10 minutes of good work in, then *BUZZ* you get a notification…
‘Your friend sent you a funny Instagram reel.’
Of course, a funny clip on Instagram is more entertaining than this work session, so you click on the link, watch the video, and end up scrolling through 20 more shorts before snapping out of your social media-induced daze. You just wasted 20 minutes.
You’ve already spent 45 minutes of your 120 and only done 10 minutes of real work.
Now you try toget back to work, it takes you another 15 minutes to get in the zone. This time, you get 20 minutes of good, focused work before you get the urge to open your phone.
In the back of your mind, you might think, “This task is a bit difficult… and I’ve been at it for 35 minutes straight. Maybe I should just check my texts and see if I missed anything.” Or you may even mindlessly grab your phone with no real intent
So you spend 20 minutes replying to non-urgent texts, chatting, and laughing. One of your friends even sends you one of those games in iMessage, which keeps you distracted for another 15 minutes.
So now, you’ve spent 1 hour and 55 minutes of your 2 hours.
Time’s Up.
Out of that total of 120 minutes, you only completed 30 minutes of focused work and 30 minutes of shallow work.
By saying NO to your friends’ messages, at least temporarily, and by using focused work sessions, you could instead complete two 50-minute work sessions.
This would have netted you 70 minutes of focused work, 30 minutes of shallow work, plus about 20 minutes of mental reset.
That’s a stark contrast.
You could have at least doubled the time worked and made exponentially more progress.
Which way is going to get you to your goal quicker?
Putting Focus Sessions Into Practice
Distractions can come from our colleagues, friends, family, just about everyone, and they can seem benign, but as we just showed, two distractions can destroy a whole 2-hour work session
You must advocate for yourself.
Some tasks can be outright declined (politely), but other times, you simply need to tell the person that you’re focused on a task currently and that you can help them in X amount of time. Or, DND is always a friendly way of telling people to leave you alone LOL. 🙂
Then, genuinely go and help that person out. Again, laser-focus your time with them and complete whatever important thing it may be. This is much better than half-focusing on helping them while still being concerned with your other work.
Again, this is a skill that must be practiced. You may mess it up the first few times and come off as rude or totally miss the mark and end up committing yourself to lower-priority tasks…
That’s all okay!
You are breaking old habits and building new ones. Keep at it, and in time, you can become a master of what you allow to have your attention.
Reducing the constant task swapping will result in greater productivity and less burnout.
Delegate: Your Time is VALUABLE
You’ve heard the term, but it’s not a cliche, it’s real.
You are a person with 24 hours, and there are certain tasks that MUST be completed by you and certain tasks where it makes no difference if you personally do them so long as they get done.
For business owners, a good rule is to determine an estimation of the value of your time. Simply take your weekly income and divide it by how many hours you work per week. If you can hire someone to do this task for less than your value estimation, do it!
Now, this does become a bit murky when you’re considering non-monetary goals, so instead, I like to fall back on the concept of “If it makes no difference, who does it or if someone else is more skilled in the task, and it doesn’t break the bank. Do it.”
If it makes sense to outsource, why saddle yourself with it?
Delegation is not just for the world of business or work but also for your personal life.
As an owner and operator of a meal prep company, Meals of Dopeness, cooking, and meal prepping is one of the largest time sinks for people, and it’s often the easiest to be delegated out, and oftentimes for your own taste buds, it should be.
Think about all the work that goes into it. Planning recipes, waiting in line at the store, preparing the ingredients, cooking, and then cleaning things up!
And not to mention, most of us aren’t exactly chefs, so the food may not even be to our liking.
If you can learn to identify the tasks that can be delegated to others, like cooking, cleaning, or data entry, you can maximize your ability to focus on the tasks that absolutely require your attention and thus most efficiently use your mental resources and physical energy.
Take Action and Control
Remember:
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
Don’t store these tips in your head and let them get old and moldy; don’t let them become another great idea that never yields any benefit.
Instead, take a few moments today to start integrating them into your work. The quicker you start implementing them, the sooner you can start reaping the benefits of controlling your time and, thus, controlling your outcomes.
Here’s a Quick Summary:
Pre-requisite for Time Management Success: Realize that you are in control of your time and how you spend it. No one is forcing you to do anything. Take responsibility for how you spend your time because you cannot fix what you do not control.
- Conduct a time audit to see how you really spend your time and identify places for improvement.
- Prioritize the most important and urgent tasks and focus on those that truly move the needle. Set your daily highlight and block out time for it.
- Focus your attention on one thing and become a task-completion-laser who burns through tasks like they’re nothing.
- Learn to say “No” to distractions and interruptions in a tactful and respectful way.
- Delegate tasks that can be delegated. There is no nobility in saddling yourself with unnecessary work.
You can have anything you want in life; you just need to choose and prioritize it.
If you have any questions about how to implement these time management tips or if you have some personal time management tips that you found work, share in the comments below!
Stay Focused, Stay Dope.
Relevant Readings:
Leave a Reply