EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT.
Effective time management can not only help you find more hours in a day and get an adequate night’s rest but also, by reducing your stress and anxiety levels, it can ensure that you get a sounder and untroubled sleep. Although successfully adopting this skill does require re-thinking your values and priorities, and making some major sustainable changes to your lifestyle, the resulting benefits are more than worth the effort. Some of the most notable benefits of managing your time better are:
Reaching your goals
Finding stability in life
Improving relationships
Diminishing procrastination and wasted time
Increasing productivity
Finding more free time
Reducing frustration
Advancing your career
Getting more satisfaction from life
Improving your health
To help streamline your life and get yourself into a better mental and emotional place, don’t put working on your time management skills on tomorrow’s to-do list; start today! Here are some key ideas for taking your time back, and your personal power as a result:
Know your personal style and Achilles’ heels. Identify those areas that are pain points for you. Are you a procrastinator? Are you scattered in your approach? Do you write things down but then forget where you put the list? These are your obstacles in getting to your goals, the real reasons why you haven’t achieved your desired results in the past. Know where you need to focus your attention and what you need to change in your approach, first and foremost. “Know thyself” is an important first step to making effective change happen.
Get rid of the to-do list. To-do lists are extremely popular, but unfortunately, they don’t work very well. This is because they don’t take into account what matters most to you, your values and your priorities. Identify your values: What’s most important to you? Then look at what needs to be done and create a priority item list, putting things in order of their importance that connects back to your values.
Focus each day on your Top 5. Instead of focusing on things that leave you feeling like you haven’t made any real headway, focus first on those five most important things – the rest will hopefully fall into place.
Break the to-do list down into discrete steps. Most people’s to-do lists have BIG to-do’s that need to be broken into smaller pieces in order to be doable. Once you have the smaller pieces, you can assign steps, deadlines, and people to each small piece. It’s easier to make – and see – progress with many small things rather than one large overwhelming one. Taking the time to do this will save you loads of work in the long run.
Have a place for everything and everything in its place. Disorganized space often leads to a disorganized mind, and both will hinder your progress toward the most important matters and goals in your life. Don’t hesitate to get rid of some of the things that create clutter, and develop a system that works for you. Again, you may need to spend time to organize, but you gain time on the back end.
Be jealous of your time. Sure, Facebook and Instagram are great fun, and it’s wonderful to be able to keep up with friends and family but watch your time carefully. The more time you spend online, the more difficult it will become to get back to your typically not-so-fun daily priorities. Allow yourself 10 minutes for nothingness and then turn your attention back to things that really matter.
Dr Anshul Mahajan
Consultant psychiatrist