Tag: Time Management

Spending Time

Happiness, The Pathway To Fulfilment

In the UK between the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October Greenwich Mean Time goes forward one hour to take advantage of there being more light in the evening than in the morning during the Summer. Which means the clocks went back one hour today. The aim is to give the like of farmers more time to do their work during the Summer.

This moving of time and the hours of the day are agreed upon to allow us to all work to the same timescale. It is a practical use of the time that we have each day, by dividing it into portions that can be allocated and measured. This is without getting into the physics of relative Spacetime.

This brings up the point of how we allocate our time during each day. Many of us will spend a lot of our time on social media or watchng TV or a streaming service like Netflix, which could be seen as a good use of our time or not. A better question would be, is the quality of how we spend time good?

If you spend most of a weekend binge watching a series on Netflix the hours spent on that is high in quantity but I would argue that it is low in quality. Spending the weekend with friends, you could argue, is higher in quality. It depends on what you value, which is different for each of us.

Doing an audit of how we spend our time and thinking about the benefits of each thing we do can mean we move the arch of our lives towards a more meaningful existence.

Mastering Your Time

Achieving Goals, Success

“Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.”

– Peter Drucker

 

Why we should master our time

If we do not master our time then we will continually miss opportunities to move closer to success in the areas of life that we care about and our lives will be what happens when we are busy making plans. Time will not stop moving forwards, we cannot control the passage of time, only how we choose to live as time passes by. Therefore, mastering time management is one of the most important skills to have and is a skill that can be learned, with practice and good strategies.

 

When it comes to mastering your time there are two well used items that are very rarely used to their full potential, these are the calendar and the to-do list. There is a smart way to use them and then there is the way that most people employ, which works against optimal time management. Usually we add things to our calendar as they pop up in our lives so we don’t forget to do or attend them, which on the surface is useful, but success is built on excellent time management, for which we need to be more strategic.

 

Mastering our calendar

Let’s look at how we can effectively use the calendar. To best use a calendar we need to block out everything that we want to do in blocks of time, both essential and non essential things, so we have some structure to cut down on the amount of time that we waste not working on the things we want to be successful at. For this I suggest using an electronic calendar like Google Calendar, or one of the many other very good alternatives, that allow you to add in items by the minute and allow you to add reminders. Many of these calendars will also allow you to colour code items, for those of you that are visual thinkers like me. These should be events and activities that take up a chunk of time, both recurring things that happen every day or every week like going to work and one off events like weddings. These are not to be confused with tasks, for these we will need to use the to-do list, which I will come onto soon.

 

Firstly, we block out the things we have to do like our job, family commitments, appointments and the like, important things that have to be prioritised first. I call these the Everyday Essentials. Secondly, we block out the things that are important to us, things that we are passionate about, like meditation, going to the gym, being creative, religious worship and the things we want to become successful at; for me that is this blog. I call these Passion Essentials. Thirdly, we block out the things that are not essential, things like meeting up with friends for a drink or going to watch a movie. I call these the Non-Essentials.

 

This process of blocking out time should ideally extend to planning out the whole year with everything we know we will be doing, like the hours we will be working and family holidays, as well as one off events we know about. Then as the year progress we will be able to add in more things as they come up, usually over the future month or two. In this way we will know what we will be doing the following day, week and month, which will reduce any time that we would otherwise be wasting figuring out what we are going to do during the day ahead. There will undoubtedly be gaps in the calendar, which is a good thing, because it gives time to fit in unexpected events as well as allowing us to utilise the to-do list to include the tasks we need to complete over the following days and weeks.

 

Mastering the to-do list

The problem with to-do lists is that they often seem like a long list of things that we do not end up doing because we do not know where to begin, so we do nothing. What we need to do to get the best out of the to-do list is to prioritise the items on the list by importance and how soon they need to be completed. This could be to respond to an email or to work on an assignment or go to a meeting.

 

First we write out the items that need to be completed and then prioritise the items on the list by writing next to each of them a number to show the importance and a letter to show how soon the item needs to be completed. Either a 1, 2 or 3  and an A, B or C. This is what these numbers and letters mean.

1 – Very important
2 – Important

3 – Not important

A – Complete as soon as possible
B – Complete within the next week

C – Complete in the next month

 

We can prioritise the items by how soon they need completing and then their importance, so everything with 1A is completed first, then 2A and then 3A. Then we move on to 1B, 2B and 3B and so on. Once we have prioritised the to-do list we can then add these tasks onto our calendar around the things that we have already blocked out.

 

There are mobile apps that allow you to create to-do lists where the items can be moved around in order and categorised by colour, as well as moving the to-do items onto the app calendar. Some of these apps sync the app calendar with the calendar on the mobile phone and email account, so they will be included in the calendar which we have already blocked out. I recommend the To-Do Calendar Planner by isoTimer, which will sync with the Google calendar linked to the Google account on the mobile phone, if you have a Google account. This app is only available on Android, but is an excellent app.

 

Final thoughts

Using a calendar to block out the events in our lives and a prioritised to-do list to organise the tasks we need to complete in this way will mean that we end up with less time wasted and more success in our lives. The level to which you plan out each of your days is up to you. You might prefer to leave big parts of your days with nothing in them or you might prefer to account for every minute of every day, the choice is yours, as it is your life. However, I do believe that some degree of structure will allow you to make the most of your days, and therefore your weeks, months and years. I sincerely hope that you have a long and fulfilling life, and that you achieve success in your chosen passion.