Back to Articles
Not enough time in the day? 
‘Don’t say you don’t have enough time,
you have exactly the same number of hours
per day that were given to Michelangelo,
Mother Teresa and Albert Einstein’
- H. Jackson Brown
Have you ever found yourself feeling you have too much to do in such little time? Do you sometimes lie awake at night thinking about all the things you have to do the next day?
How is it that some people have no more time available to them than you or I, yet they appear to get more done in less time?
It is because they have mastered the habits and tools of successful time management.
Through my coaching practice, I am facilitating in a growing trend of clients setting goals in time management. People are seeing the value of generating more time for themselves. The motives range from decreased stress levels to creating more fun on their life!
When considering your time management skills it is important to gain awareness of your current time expenditure. If you were to imagine your time as the following items:
ROCKS: represent all the things that are important to us - the pillars of our life (family, relationship, career, health, home, creativity etc)
PEBBLES: represent all the survival tasks we need to do in life (travel, work, clean the house, groceries, pay bills etc)
SAND: represents all the things we do for others (such as people pleasers, counsel friends etc)
WATER: represents our time wasting activities (watching TV, boredom, procrastination etc)
Fill a glass vase according to how much time you spend with each activity over a week. If you are like most people, depending on you priorities you may not be able to fit much of what’s important to you in the vase especially if there is an abundance of pebbles, sand and water.
However, with greater awareness we can plan our time by emphasising what is most important to us. This helps create balance and control.
Most of us can relate to the pressures of priorities on our limited hours. These priorities cover all aspects of our professional and personal lives.
Increasingly, work commitments can easily override quality ‘Me Time’. With repetition, this contributes towards symptoms of stress and in extreme cases can lead to burn out.
Although there is no magic wand to create additional hours in the day, by introducing a time management ‘spring clean’ you can maximise both your professional and personal time thus leaving you in control of your day.
‘It takes time to save time’
You cannot manage the flow of time but you can manage your experience of time (your attitudes, beliefs and actions). By gaining awareness of how you think about it, you will be able to have a clearer understanding of how you perceive time and the effects it can manifest such as stress.
For example, think about the distinction in your perception of time between when you’re late and when you’re waiting for someone who’s late. Time hasn’t changed but your experience will based on your perception.
We can all slip into unproductive habits but it is being able to recognise and redesign these habits to your advantage that contributes to effective time management.
Here are some key steps to greater time management:
- Prioritise your efforts:
Make the distinction between things that are important and things that are urgent.
Spend more time on items of importance rather than those that are urgent as they create greater effectiveness.
- Eliminate sources of adrenaline:
A source of adrenaline is any attitude, relationship, situation, substance or activity which leaves you feeling ‘pumped’. This feeling can create distraction from your focus, increased anxiety and stress and therefore intensifies the feeling that time is flying away.
- Simplify your tasks
Classify your actions into Under-Responding and Over-Responding. Under-responding involves a quick response e.g. a SMS rather than a phone call. Over-responding refers to over-servicing a situation to prevent it returning in the future.
- Really listen to others
How often do you allow intruding thoughts into your mind when someone is trying to tell you something? This creates a two fold anxiety for yourself by not being able to give your full attention to the person or act upon the intruding thought. You are left feeling incomplete about both.
- Respect time and its capacity
Despite the fact there are only 24 hours in a day, we are often caught borrowing time from the next day to catch up with today’s tasks. We can let our work time pour into our relationship time, or our project ride though our personal time however this can create unfavourable consequences. Yet if we accept the boundaries of time and choose what we wish to give up in order to have the ‘more’ time we require, then we begin to respect the management of time.
- Create time for yourself
Our personal value of time generates our thoughts. If we constantly think time is against us and there is never enough then we are unconsciously creating an associated feeling of confinement and restriction. Thus our behaviour will match our thoughts. If we were able to redesign our thinking to a state of abundance e.g. there is plenty of time for all my tasks, then we are placing ourselves in a mindset of space and freedom to complete our tasks with minimal pressure.
Ultimately it is our choice how we wish to implement time management. By making simple adjustments to our daily schedule we are starting to stretch our ability to efficiently manage our time.
Claire Hall
Subscribe to our site for future articles.
Back to Articles |
|
