Time Management Tips – Organize Your Day

For the busy professional, effective time management is essential. One of key aspects of being successful is being able to manage your day. If you can sort through the demands on your time efficiently, you can take your career or your business to a whole new level. Many intelligent, competent, even very skilled individuals find themselves hitting a brick wall once achieving a certain level of success. They struggle to find a solution to their problem of limited upward mobility. If they could manage to get a handle on things, be the master of their day rather than a slave to half-finished projects and looming deadlines, they could do better. You could do better.

Scheduling Blocks

One of the first things to realize when you’re trying to set up your day is that there are only so many hours in a day. Everyone has a clock with 24 hours on it. And, time waits for no one. Break your day up into hours. That gives you an initial 24 blocks of time to deal with. Studies have shown that a full night’s rest is important to both mental and physical health, so be sure to schedule this right off the bat. The average person needs eight hours of rest each day. You may need more. You may need less. Figure that out and schedule it. For argument’s sake, you just cut out a huge chunk of time for your day–one-third to be exact. So, now you have 16 blocks that you’re dealing with. It might seem like a lot, but let’s look at how quickly that fills up.

Before and After Bed

Once you have your sleep time scheduled, it is time to move on to scheduling the rest of your day. Block out an hour before and an hour after sleep. The hour before is your winding down time. Neuroscientists will tell you that it is important to set your brain properly to get ready to sleep before turning in for the night. You need to take a shower or bath, brush your teeth, and just kind of relax. You want to limit the time you spend in light before laying down for the evening, so do what you need to in the well-lit bathroom and then retire to a darker room about half an hour before sleep. That will get your brain ready to shut down for evening. After you wake up, you need some time to get ready for the day. This might include reading an inspirational passage, doing some exercises, or listening to something educational along with taking a shower or having breakfast.

Your morning routine is more important than you may realize. You need time to get your mind going and in the right state before tackling the day. Exercises in the morning will show long-term positive health effects, but also help to oxygenate your blood and get your heart at an active rate. You don’t want to be grabbing a protein bar and running out the door last minute to get your day started. It sets you off kilter and doesn’t get you in the right frame of mind to take the world by storm. Instead, it sets you up for a day of trying to play catchup and still falling behind. Speaking of protein bars, protein has been shown to have a major effect on your health and provides the energy you need to be successful throughout the day. Make some eggs, have some bacon, or work in some sort of healthy, protein rich breakfast as part of your daily morning routine. Make it real food most of the time, not just a quick protein bar, which often aren’t as healthy as the advertisements would lead you to believe.

What Else Do You Need to Schedule?

While you have your sleep time as well as your hour before and after bed scheduled, what else do you absolutely need to be sure to schedule? This is probably easier than you realize. You need to eat, right? Right. Schedule an hour for dinner and an hour for lunch. You may not need the full hour in either case, but it’s good to have that extra time to sit back and relax. If you drive to work, be sure to schedule plenty of time for it so that you aren’t caught off guard by inclement weather or traffic. Schedule time to get back home, too, because that’s important as well. So, you now have an additional four hours of the day accounted for. That means you are at 14 hours out of a 24 hour day scheduled (8 hours for rest, an hour before and an hour after, an hour for lunch, an hour for dinner, and an hour to and from work), leaving you 10 hours. Are you noticing how quickly this time fills up yet?

It is also important to schedule some time for you and your family. If you have kids, you should try to schedule at least an hour each day to spend with the kids. If you don’t have kids, but you’re married, use that hour to spend with your spouse. If you don’t have a wife or kids, call that extra time you can use to nurture relationship with those outside of work. This would include friends, parents, siblings. You could also use that time as “me time,” where you work on a hobby, bettering yourself, learning something, etc. It is very important that you make sure to schedule time for people who are important in your life.

Now, you have nine hours left to schedule for work.

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Time Management of Your Work Schedule

So far, you have nine hours left to schedule out for the work day. While many would have you believe that the only way to get ahead is to get to the office early and stay late, working 12 plus hour days. This isn’t healthy and it is not the right approach. Those people who need to get to work early and stay late are often doing so because they are having a hard time getting things done during normal working hours. Why? Poor time management. They fail to be in control of their day the way this method will help you be in control of your day.

With those nine hours, it is recommended that you spend at least one hour learning something new. Take time to research a program you use regularly at work and find new ways you can use the software. Find out how to be a power user of the platform, learning time saving tricks and additional things you can do that will wow your boss, your colleagues, and your clients. Take an hour in the beginning of the day to catch up on emails, voice messages, and other things that came in while you were away from the office. You will also end up using the hour at the end of your day going over emails and other messages that you missed during the rest of the day. The secret to this is that this is the only time you are checking emails and messages. If a call comes in during the day, you can probably wait to deal with it. Emails can almost certainly wait. Knowing when you are going to be on the phone, answering emails, other related contact duties is going to help you get your day in order fast.

For the rest of your day, you should have a list of top priorities that you need to work on. This is something you will put together during that last hour of your day you spent checking emails and messages as you will also use that hour to review what was accomplished throughout the day and what you need to work on tomorrow. Use that list to plan out your hours for the day. Schedule tasks on an hourly basis. This is important, because you want to be able to do a few different things. You should have goals set for each hour. In reality, things should each take about 45 to 50 minutes, giving your 10 to 15 minutes at the end of each hour to stretch and relax. You want to be able to relax your brain and get up and stretch your muscles on an hourly basis. This will help keep your mind and your body fresh throughout the day.

Setting tasks and goals for each hour also puts you on a sort of deadline. It is a personal deadline. Since you made the deadline, the goals should be reasonable. With a deadline, you have a reason to keep on track and get things done. If things end up being harder than originally expected and will take more time, don’t go over your hour. Instead, reschedule the remaining task. This also helps keep you well grounded. Using this time management method, you begin to realize your own limits and that you can offer your best and nothing more. That helps you setting expectations both for yourself and others. The other way this works is that you end up finding out where your limits are. Knowing where your limits are enables you to set benchmarks, so you have something to work toward improving.

Improving Your Success with Time Management

This article discusses a number of techniques you can use to help you reach the next levels of your career and improve your business by managing your day. Proper time management is a valuable skill that will take you some time to perfect. It requires dedication. It requires the ability to organize and prioritize your daily tasks. It requires that you take time to not get completely lost in work and remember to spend time on yourself, with your family and friends. If you try to override the important principles of improving yourself, spending time to wind down, exercising and stretching, the time management techniques mentioned here will fail to reach their full potential and that means that you will be in danger of achieving your full potential. Try these methods and give them at least a couple of months, which is enough time to tweak your scheduling, make some missteps, and learn how to leverage your time to best help you achieve success.

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