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Time Management Tips: Up Close and Personal (Pt. 1 of 3)

Time Management Secrets
1. Secrets of a To-Do List Virtuoso (Pt. 3 of 3)
2. Magic of Time Management: The No-Stress No-Tech Time Management Super Tool (Pt. 2 of 3)
3. Time Management Tips: Up Close and Personal (Pt. 1 of 3)

Fingers stretching rubber bandsWouldn’t it be great if we could stretch out time to meet our needs and wants? What a relief to have an extra day here and there to ease the stress of a deadline. If we could just personalize time that way . . .

What an absurd stretch of the mind.

So, we cannot personalize time itself but we sure can personalize our use of time. And we must because time is our most precious resource for stress relief.

Our current blog series maps out how to personalize your management to enjoy noticeable stress relief.

Much of the time, people feel controlled by time constraints. When you personalize your management of time, you rule your time, it does not rule you. Time Management Personalized for Stress Relief is an easy-to-follow system that will efficiently meet your unique needs and lifestyle. 

Overworked?

A major reason people are chronically stressed is they feel they have too little time for everything they need to do. Put another way, they are overworked.

In a previous blog post, we touched upon the reality of the overworked adult in America

According to this Statista survey, the lack of time is the leading obstacle to getting or staying healthy in the United States.

In 2017, around 44 percent of adults experienced stress frequently in daily life and 41 percent did not have enough time to do the things they wanted to do.

The fact is, overwork and its inevitable stress effect are often by-products of poor time management. If we can make our day fit into the allotted hours of operation, then we can sleep easy.

How can you manage your time to maximize all the available hours of the day?

Time Management Personalized for Stress Relief

Begin with 3 simple steps: Record, Revamp and Economize.

Step #1: Record Your Time: Where Does It Go?

You must know where you are to determine how to get to where you want to go.

Journal & pen to personalize Time Management for Stress ReliefSo, your first step in Time Management Personalized for Stress Relief is to take

inventory.

Become completely aware of how you are spending your time every single day. Pexels Graphic

This means you record your activities from the moment you wake up until bedtime. You also indicate the time spent on each activity. Maintain this log for at least two weeks.

You might notice, as you track every day, that you instinctively start using your time more efficiently. Nevertheless, keep logging for at least a couple of weeks. Your record will reveal average trends of your various activities.

In addition to recording your activities and the average amount of time you spend on each activity, please rate each activity from 1 to 5.

1 — “a total waste of my time”

2 – “not a good use of my time”

3 – “neither good nor bad”

4 – “a good use of my time”

5 –“an excellent use of my time”

As a detailed picture emerges, you will have both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of your current activities. This record will be an essential guide in your Personalized Time Management for Stress Relief

2. Revamp Your Activities

Poor time management often arises not from the activities but from the time allotted to them. Perhaps your Activity Log revealed this to you.

Watching TV, for example, can be beneficial in many ways. However, excessive passive viewing can negatively impact your precious resource: time. What follows: regret and stress.

Moreover, if you are missing deadlines and feeling stressed about not having sufficient time for all the things that you want to do, then there’s definitely something wrong with your selection of activities.

Revamping your daily activities is actually quite simple and fun with Time Management Personalized for Stress Relief. Every aspect is all about you.

First, write down all the things you would be doing if you had the additional time. Don’t hold back when making this list – write down anything that comes to mind.

Example: My first list looked something like this:

– Practice daily meditation

– Enjoy more outdoor recreation

– Learn how to play chess

– Read more fiction

– Learn a new language

– Spend more time with the kids

– Play more video games

My list may look trivial to some of you, but it meant a lot to me a few years ago. At the time, I was approaching burnout from my work. My thought was that I needed to work more quickly to complete assignments, and this would open the way for some of these activity goals.

By creating a journal, like your Time Management Personalized for Stress Relief, I was able to identify those time-consuming activities. When I realized where my time was going, I was able to cut corners.

But the real answer lay in the activities that were consuming too much time in my day.

Eventually, I was able to make time for all of the things in my initial list – and even more!

Be assured, you will be able to replicate my results by simply being mindful of all your activities. Just ask yourself, “Do I really need to spend time on this activity?”

Once you are more mindful of where your time is going, you can easily identify and remove the common distractions that eat your time.

Step #3 Economize Your Time

Perhaps the activities that fill your days are essential to your work or family life. Yet you’re still falling behind and a subtle, or not so subtle, buildup of stress is developing.

If this is the case, then you need to economize on your time: Find more efficient ways of doing things so you have sufficient time to do everything you need to do.

Again, this is Time Management Personalized for Stress Relief. The way you decide to accomplish your obligations and responsibilities can reduce the time you spend on each task. This will effectively allow more time for additional activities or even leisure

EXAMPLE: How many times a day do you check your email, facebook or other social media?

The average person checks their email about 15 times per day. But a recent study from researchers at the University of British Columbia found that when people were limited to checking their email just three times per day, their stress levels decreased significantly. Source 

Man checks tablet broadcasting social mediaI met someone who admitted that he checks his email every hour. Now, assuming that it takes about 10 minutes to open your email and scroll through messages, that’s already 60 minutes gone in a day after the sixth visit to the inbox.

Unless constant email checking, chatting, messaging or tweeting is an integral part of one’s work responsibilities, it is little more than a time-consuming nervous habit. It would rate 4 or 5 on the Activity Log in Step 1 above.

If you log the minutes you spend checking your social media, you likely will discover where a chunk of your time is lost.

Think: You’ll never get back that precious piece of time. It’s gone!

There is a remedy for this trend of social media consumption. Limit your checking to once or twice a day.

Urgent messages do demand attention. But on an average day, a person should not be preoccupied with checking his extracurricular communications.

Instead, make a habit of replacing the activity with a more constructive action that will support the list you made in Step 2.

The Takeaway:

Assess your current use of time with a written log. Revamp your daily activities to fit a schedule. Alter the way you accomplish tasks to streamline work efforts.

Do these things and you’re already becoming the master of your time.

As you are getting underway with these practical steps, you can proceed to review a simple, time-tested method that will automatically put your day in order.

We look forward to bringing this special technique to you in Part 2 of our series on Time Management. See you there!

To Hear and To Help, That is Our Mission

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