Helping you maintain a healthy work/life balance:
1. Make Your Body Work for You Often we don’t take our natural body clock into account when we are planning our day. Times of high energy are generally between nine am and twelve noon, sometimes rising again after nine pm at night. We have medium energy levels around eight am, and between four and six pm. Our lowest energy levels are often before eight am in the morning, between 12 and two pm and between six and eight pm. Think about the tasks you have to do during the day and group them according the level of activity or input required. Make a note on which ones should be carried out during your high energy times, and the ones which are best carried out during your low spots.
2. Use a Weekly Planner A weekly plan can help you see if you have patterns or connections throughout the week you can use and make the most of. This is something you can create simply on a computer. Task programmes such as the one on outlook express or rememberthemilk.com help you to jot down jobs at they come up- even if the due date for the task is several months off. It just gives you a place to put all of those jobs that need doing, and helps you to structure your days, weeks and months. Alternatively, there are good weekly planning diaries available if you’d prefer to work this way. At the beginning of each week place in all the meetings you already know about, and then place in your work chunks so you know these are times you are not available for other tasks. This is a good thing to take with you while you are away from your desk so you can know where and when you should be somewhere.
3. Use a Whiteboard If you find you and your family are here there and everywhere, or you work with a team of people who are often all over the place, a simple white board that can be updated every day with everyone’s basic plans can work well. It’s really like a timetable of your day that others can refer to.
4. ..OR make your Diary available to your team/family If you work in an office or if you work for home and have to juggle family needs as well, then create an open diary that everyone else can see. This gives you and the rest of the people involved an easy way to see if you are free when they want you to be. 5. Don’t forget to create breaks in your schedule. Place time for you to focus on specific tasks as regular blocks through your week for some “ME” time – you deserve a reward for all your hard work! This is just as important as meeting time, so factor it in and then structure your time around it. Some people do this with gym visits and other R and R ideas as well including time with family or significant others. A short powernap in the afternoon can help you re-boost your energy – though this probably should only be contemplated if you work from home! Powernapping is a skill you can learn over time if it doesn’t come naturally. Learning some simple self hypnosis techniques here can also greatly help.
6. It seems like such a simple solution but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t prioritise well. Before you begin, consider what it is that you want to most achieve. You can’t prioritise if you don’t know what your big picture is! So first you need to work out where you are headed and what you are meant to be doing. Doing this helps you understand what your key focus should be, and this in itself can make working out your priority tasks a far simpler exercise. Once you’ve worked out what it is that you need to focus on you can work out how you are going to prioritise. You can either do this for everything today and now, or you can create a plan that takes you across your planning form a weekly, to a monthly or even yearly plan. It’s very simple. All you really need to do is to work out: What you need to get done ASAP. These are those urgent tasks that you really can’t put off. They might be in response to someone else (such as preparing for a meeting, making a call or replying to an email) or they may be tasks you are initiating yourself (Such as training a new staff member or meeting a client.) Important tasks that need to be scheduled in and have to be done. These may not be quick jobs but are important and have a deadline attached to them or directly relate to your larger goal. It might include writing a book or report, creating a training program or developing a system to sort your papers or some related idea. These tasks take longer than the others so will need chucks of time allocated to them rather than trying to work on them when you have time. Later tasks. This list is for all the other things you need to do that are not so urgent. For example you might want to design a logo or spend time brainstorming. This might be the time you want to put aside for learning new skills.
Once you’ve made your lists, take a look at them again. Place a tick next to the jobs you enjoy and like doing, and a x next to the ones you try to avoid, and don’t enjoy. There is always going to be tasks you don’t want to do floating around. The best way to deal with them is to first admit that you don’t want to do them! The trick is then to do the urgent jobs that you don’t like doing first. You can reward yourself once you have completed them with a small break for a walk or a coffee.
*Be careful that you haven’t slipped a non urgent task into your urgent pile simply because it’s a personal favourite. This is easier said than done as we all want to spend the day on tasks we enjoy- even if these tasks may not be the most urgent. These tasks actually work best as rewards for all the other tasks you have to do, so use them to your best advantage* To make it easy to read and sort through you can place the lists in a table format to make it easier to follow.
URGENT IMPORTANT LATER Enjoyable Task Non Enjoyable Task
You need to get the urgent tasks that you don’t enjoy done first otherwise they are never going to get done! The key is not to put off all the things you really don’t like until later on in the week. Try to move all the things you least enjoy up to the top of the list to get them done and over with.
Making it all Work Together
Once you’ve read all over this, it can feel like there is a lot of time and effort required into using less time! However it’s all pretty simple, and once the new routines are set into place!
To recap: The first step is to spend time looking at how organised you are already. Identifying problem spots helps you to work out where to improve Once you work out where you waste time, you can find ways to counteract them. This might include being a bit tougher on the amount of time you spend online, or learning to say no a bit more often. Recognizing your body clock affects your productivity is an important part of effective time management. Make your natural body clock work for you, ensuring your high energy times are allocated for those more complex tasks.
The key to managing time best is to find a solution that fits your personality and current situation best. You can use priority lists, today lists and creating time chunks to focus on particular tasks to get them completed – and, just as importantly, don’t forget to schedule in some “ME” time as a reward for a job well done!!
credit : CINDY FORBES
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