by Elyse | May 5 | Planning
Time is an asset we all have, and it is the one asset that is not replenishable. Here are 13 tips for time management.
- Decide how you will spend your time ahead of time. If you don’t decide ahead of time, it will be easier for you to be pulled in other directions by others or to become easily distracted. By determining ahead, you also consciously choose how you want to spend your time. Planning will also help you work out problems or mistakes ahead of time. This will save you time because you can anticipate if a plan will work and change it while it is still on paper instead of in the middle of executing the plan.
- Visualize how you’ll spend your time by time blocking. When you list how long you think each task will take you or how long you are willing to spend on any given task, place it in your calendar for that time, creating a time block. This is part of planning, and it will provide you with a sense of what you need to get done ahead of something else, how much you realistically fit in a day, and can help you visualize how much time you are spending on any one activity.
- Schedule your free time in your calendar. When I first learned about time blocking in college, I read about it was best to schedule your free time first. This way you have something to look forward to after you’re done working, and it keeps you focused on your present task so that you don’t have to cut into the free time you are looking forward to.
- Include white space on your calendar. When I first tried time blocking, I would block every hour I was awake. This would create a problem if something took longer than expected because there needed to be room for overflow. It also didn’t include any breaks. I would be so ambitious in the planning that I wouldn’t stop considering how I would feel that day, trying to stay on schedule.
- Think about your future self as someone you love and want to care for. When you decide on what you are going to do, how long it is going to take you, and what your working hours are, think of the future you (the one who is going to be executing your plans) as someone you love and want to take care of. Think of her capacity and how she will feel, and try to take care of her ahead of time so that it is easier to adhere to the schedule you create.
- Plan for results and not activities. When you put things on your calendar, make sure you plan the results you want to produce, not just the activity you will be doing. This will keep you from doing things that keep you busy but don’t move you forward and will help you feel clear and focused. If you feel overwhelmed at work, grab the guide 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.
- Know what your values are and what your current priority is. By knowing what you value and your priority, it will be easier for you to honor the commitments you make with your time. It will also be easy to see if you are living your values by how you are spending your time. Knowing your values and priorities will help you make decisions regarding your time.
- Delegate what you can. There are so many tasks that need to get done at work and at home. Try to delegate as much as you can to other people so that you are focusing on your most important work and your most important priorities.
- Automate. If there are things you can automate, like automatic bill pay or setting up a subscription service for household goods that you need, set these things up so that they happen automatically, and you don’t need to spend time on them every month.
- Batch tasks together. The more you can batch your tasks together, the more efficient you will be. You will be much more efficient and focused if you spend one hour replying to emails every morning than if you stop what you are working on and respond to each email as soon as they arrive.
- Ask if something can wait. When you feel the urge to run a load of dishes or do laundry, ask yourself if it can wait. If it can, then don’t do it right then. If the answer is no and the task can’t wait, it is time to do it.
- Focus on whatever you are working on when you are working on it. Only do one thing at a time. Keep the center of your attention focused on your task at hand. Shut out distractions, turn off notifications, and keep yourself focused on what you are working on. This will make you more efficient and more productive.
- Have a ritual for getting into a productive mood. This is especially helpful if you need help with getting into your work. Create a ritual for yourself that brings you joy. Get your favorite drink, light a candle, and turn on some music. Do something that will help you get into your flow and make it more enjoyable to start working.
Tips for Time Management
These tips will help you become more organized, efficient, and productive with your time. Your time is a precious resource and should be treated as such. By being committed, determined and focused you can get more done in less time and can set out to do everything you want to do.
by Elyse | Feb 24 | Planning
‘I’m so busy’ has become the default answer when someone asks you how you are doing lately. And having a full life is a good thing. But, being so busy that you feel overwhelmed, stressed, or like you need more time to prioritize your health or the things vital to you is not an enjoyable experience.
These are some ways to reject busyness in your life.
Say No To Anything You Don’t Want To Do
You might feel busy because you agree to every request and invitation. You don’t need to respond with a yes to every invitation.
You might also be adding things to your to-do list that you feel you have to do that you don’t have to. This could be things like folding the laundry, buying a gift, or something else you think you should do but don’t have to.
Once you write down a to-do list, cross out anything you don’t want or need to do. There are a couple of things you could completely let go of, wait to do, or reframe how you think of the task.
Let’s say you don’t have to fold laundry today but want to have all your clothes put away before tomorrow. Just admitting to yourself that this is something you want and not something that you have to do or should do will make you feel different about the task.
Focus On Your Task At Hand
This is useful on the micro level of how you spend each minute of your day and the broader story of the focus of your life.
What is the primary thing you focus on each day? Do you have one over-arching goal for the direction of your life right now, or is your focus split in a million different directions?
When you are trying to accomplish many things simultaneously, it takes you longer to finish them. Pick one task, tune out the distractions around you, and finish it. Then, move on to your next job. You will move so much faster and get so much more done quickly when you operate in this way.
Stop Saying That You’re Busy
What you say out loud is essential to your brain, and your brain will go to work looking for evidence to prove what you say is true. The more you say you’re busy, the more evidence your brain will search for around you that will prove to you that it is true and the busier you will feel.
Instead, start saying that you have plenty of time for the task at hand or some other abundant belief about how much time you have that you believe. If that feels like too much of a stretch, then start asking your brain supportive questions like:
- How can I create more time in my life?
- How can I get more done in less time?
- How can I feel calmer?
Your brain will go to work to look for answers for you.
A Final Note
Busyness is a state of mind, and it is possible for you to feel less busy and less overwhelmed in your life. Start with these steps and see how much can change in a few weeks. If you try out one of these tips, let me know how it goes! I would love to hear from you!
by Elyse | Jan 17 | Planning
Some people like planning out full years, but the most effective people plan out in quarters. Let’s go over how the plan your next quarter.
Why is planning important?
- Planning lets you work out mistakes on paper ahead of time instead of in real-time
- Planning helps by saving time
- Planning also helps keep you focused and set in the direction of your biggest goals instead of being distracted by things that keep you busy or things that come up that are urgent yet not important
Plan for a quarter, not for an entire year
Since plans typically build on top of each other, planning for an entire year can be a waste of time. This is because so much can change over the year. So, the things you planned at the beginning of the year to complete at the end of the year may not be feasible or even what you want to do because of so many changes.
This is why it is better to plan quarterly than to plan yearly.
A quarter is also a small amount of time, so it is easy to stay focused and committed and then review and renew your plan with each new quarter. Ninety days is a lot less daunting than three hundred sixty days.
It is also an amount of time that is easier to grasp, making it easier to plan. A quarter can be broken into monthly and weekly chunks and is a more manageable amount of time to progress than an entire year.
How To Plan Your Next Quarter
There are vital steps to planning your next quarter. The steps are:
- Know where you want to go (long-term vision)
- Know where you are
- Decide what you want to accomplish in this quarter
- Write down your key results (how you will reach your primary objective of the quarter)
- Make a massive action list
- Put the actions on your calendar
- Determine lead and lag indicators
- Review and analyze
Know Where You Want To Go
Before you decide on goals you want to accomplish this quarter, you must determine your big, overall vision. The best way to do this is to think about where you want to be three years into the future.
Think about what you must do to accomplish your three-year vision. Now, think about something you can do now that you can achieve in a quarter that will help you get closer to your three-year vision.
You want to spend time on a goal only if it is aligned with where you want to be in your future. That is why this step is essential.
Know Where You Are
The next step is to figure out where you are right now. It will be hard to get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you are starting from.
The best way to know where you are right now is to get as close to the facts as possible. If your goal is to lose weight, you want to know exactly how much you weigh now. If your goal is to close $10,000 in sales, you need to know precisely how many dollars you are at now.
Try to keep all emotions and descript words out when determining where you are. Be as specific as possible.
Decide your primary objective for the quarter.
This is the big, over-arching goal of the quarter. Try only to pick one.
That way you can really put all your focus, attention and energy into it. If you are struggling to pick one ask yourself, which one, if I accomplish it, will help me achieve the other goals that I have?
Set Key Results
Then, figure out what are the key results. This is the how of accomplishing your primary objective for the quarter. If you achieve these results, you will have accomplished your main objective. Make sure that your list of key results are things that will make the most significant difference and not just things that will keep you busy.
Massive Action List
Now you are going to create a massive action list. This is where you want to think of absolutely everything that you need to do.
Under each key result, write down a massive action list of everything you need to do to achieve each key result. Try to add even more when you think you are done with your list. You want this list to be all-encompassing. So remember to put things on it like any research you will need to do to move forward or decisions that you will have to make.
The purpose of this list is that if you did absolutely everything on it, you would be guaranteed to reach your key results.
Put the actions on your calendar
Now, take some time and organize your massive action list. Cut out anything that is not essential or that you just don’t want to do.
Then, prioritize your massive action list into what is most important and what steps need to come first. Once you’ve done that, put the results you are planning to produce onto your calendar.
Set your lead and lag indicators
This is something I learned from the book, The 12 Week Year. In the book, the author talks about lead and lag indicators.
It is beneficial to measure your success of how well you are following your plan with lead indicators those are things you can directly control.
Lag indicators on the other hand only happen later.
An example of this is weight lost. The number of pounds of weight lost is a lag indicator since it doesn’t happen immediately. But, something like exercising four times a week for thirty minutes is a lead indicator since you can directly control that.
This is also true of sales. A lag indicator for sales would be how many dollars closed, while a lead indicator would be the number of outgoing sales call someone makes in a day. A lead indicator is you going first.
Set lead and lag indicators for your goals so you can measure the progress that you are making each week.
Review and Analyze
Each week, reflect back on the past week and review how well you did sticking to your plan. Check your calendar to see if you produced the results you had calendared on it and how well you did meeting your lead indicator goals.
Then, analyze what went well, what didn’t, what could be improved and what you want to try next.
by Elyse | Dec 16 | Leadership, Planning
Leaders need to reflect on the past year as the year ends. If you are planning, strategizing, and setting intentions for the next year, it is essential to reflect on the past year before making new plans for the future.
Why Reflect on the Past Year
There are many reasons to reflect on the past year. Some of those reasons include the following:
- creating space between this year and next year
- addressing things that need to be changed
- celebrating what has been accomplished
- planning for next year
Reflecting on the past year creates a separation between the current year and the following year. It is a crucial distinction in your mind to close one year before going into the following year, especially if you want to make significant changes.
Reflecting on the past year also helps you decide what you liked about this year and what you want to change moving forward.
Resources:
Reflecting on the past also helps you pause and recognize the things that you have accomplished and take a moment to celebrate those accomplishments. It also gives you a framework for creating a plan for the new year.
How to Reflect on the Past Year
You can use this exercise to reflect on the past year of your life, the past year for your company, your team, or your career.
You can start by just thinking about the past year. The things you did, the places you went, the people you saw, who you spent time with regularly, what your habits are, just anything but keep it contained to within the past calendar year.
If you need help jogging your memory or more specific questions, you can use some of the journals prompts from 75 Leadership Journal Prompts for Career-Driven Women. Or you can use your calendar to remind you of what you have done in the past year.
Then, start asking yourself specific questions to reflect on the past year. Ask yourself:
- What went well last year?
- What am I proud of?
- What didn’t go so well last year?
- What do I want to improve?
- What things do I want to continue doing next year that I am already doing?
- What do I want to let go of?
- What was the most significant accomplishment in the last year?
- What was my favorite memory of the last year?
- What brought me the most joy in the last year?
- What brought me the most pain in the last year?
- What do I want to try in the new year?
- If it was one year from today, what would I be happy with accomplishing?
- How are things different than they were one year ago?
Could you spend some time thinking about specific answers to these questions? It can also be helpful to list out what you know to be true about your circumstances as separate from how you feel about them.
Example: I’m in a job I hate with people who don’t respect me. This would be your thought versus the facts of the circumstances: I’m an account executive at X company. I have worked for this company for three years and have yet to get a promotion or a raise. I feel resentful.
Plan for the Future
After you have taken time to think about the past year, your accomplishments, what has changed, what has stayed the same, what you want to continue doing, and what you want to change, you can start planning for your next year.
- What is my vision for the new year?
- What is my current plan for reaching my vision?
- What will stop me from reaching my goals?
- How can I put a plan in place to overcome the things that will stop me?
A Closing Note
Reflecting on the past is important for all leaders. It is important to take some time to think about what is working, what is not working, what you want to change, what you want to try to do differently and how you could go about making those changes.
If the past year didn’t go the way you wanted it to, that doesn’t mean that next year has to go that way too. You are capable or making a plan or changing and of reaching your goals.
Make sure you grab the free guide: 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work if you want to think differently about your role at work.
by Elyse | Dec 9 | Planning
You might be thinking, “why would I ever want to keep a time journal for 24 hours? What good would that do me?” And I’m here to tell you; it will do you great. This is why you should keep a time journal for 24 hours.
First of all, what is a time journal?
A time journal records how you spend every minute of your time for a set period of time. In this case, 24 hours. Yes, down to the minute. Not just the chunks or hours or estimates of what you think you have been doing with your time (or what you are planning to do with your time) but down to the actual minute by minute record of how you spend the next 24 hours of your life.
What are the benefits of having a time journal?
Having a time journal can help you be honest with yourself about where you spend your time. It will give you an accurate representation of how much of your day you spend working, eating, scrolling on social media, taking care of household tasks, commuting, socializing and anything else that you do.
Click here to download the free guide: 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.
It will help you see visually if the way that you are spending your time reflects the values and goals that you have. If you want to have a value of spending time with your partner every night but instead see that you spend seven minutes with them and two hours scrolling through the newest videos on TikTok, a time journal will help you see that.
Another benefit of using a time journal is for tasks that you feel like you are just too busy to do, like loading the dishwasher, sending that one follow-up email or putting something away. When you are creating a time journal down to the minute and you are timing how long it takes you to do these tasks, you can see in concrete, hard numbers how long they actually take. Case in point, washing the dishes typically takes me 3 minutes, even though I always feel like I don’t have enough time to do them right now.
A time journal also helps you feel more productive and less busy. It shows you how much you are actually getting done every day. It can show you how few minutes certain tasks do actually take and the sheer amount of stuff that you can get done in a day.
It will also show you if you are spending way too long on a task. If you have a report that you need to create every week and it is taking you three hours when it should really only take you forty-five minutes, a time journal will bring some awareness to how long it is actually taking you. This can be the first step to either getting rid of the task completely, delegating it, automating some part of it or changing it in some way so that it is not taking up so much of your time.
So, how do I create a time journal anyways?
There are two ways to do this. The first one is to write down your day and how you spend your time minute by minute by hand.
7:00-7:05 get out of bed and make coffee
7:05-7:25 have coffee and scroll through social media
7:25-7:39 take shower
7:39-7:42 get dressed
7:42-7:47 pack up work bag and leave apartment
7:47-8:10 commute to work
You want to include everything you do in a day in a time journal.
The other way to do a time journal is to use an app. I use the app Toggl Track for this purpose. Toggl Track is an app built for tracking workflow time for different projects. I set up different projects in Toggl to account for different ways I spend my time during the day. There is a project for working, commuting, health, family, excess, household management, neutral, planning, personal, sleep, social, and reading.
Household management is anything that has to do with keeping a household running: washing dishes, doing laundry, making the bed, tidying up.
Neutral is for things that I do everyday: showering, getting ready, etc.
Personal is for things that I want to do like exchanging a pair of jeans for another size or engaging in a hobby.
Excess is for anything I am doing that I want to cut back on like scrolling social media or watching too much tv.
You can create projects as you start to enter tasks you are doing into your time journal and group things together as you see fit into different categories. Depending on what you do, you may want to split your working time into different categories such as meetings, admin work and revenue-generating work.
Make sure that you log every minute of a 24 hour period. Also, pick any day to do this. It doesn’t have to be a work day or a weekend or a special day or a day where you think you are going to be most productive. The best day to pick is right now because doing a time journal will give you so much insight.
Once you have completed a time journal for 24 hours, analyze it.
If you did your time journal by hand this may take a little longer but if you used Toggl Track you will be able to see a visual representation of how you are spending your day grouped by the different projects that you created.
You may be surprised by how much time you are spending on social media or how few minutes it actually takes you to fold your laundry.
Awareness is the first step to change so if there is any way that you want to be spending your time differently, a time journal is a great first step.
A Final Note on Time Journals
A time journal is a great way to see how you are spending your day, to see how long things actually take you and not how long you think they take you, to see if you are living according to your values and to help you plan your future.
by Elyse | Nov 29 | Planning
With the end of the year upon us, it is crucial to prepare for Q4. There will be end-of-year reports, time off of work, and holiday parties. Preparing ahead of time can help make Q4 go more smoothly and allow you to enjoy the time away from the office instead of feeling overwhelmed and busy. Here are 5 ways to prepare for Q4.
1. Set aside time to plan
Planning is an integral part of reaching goals and reducing overwhelm. Yet, it can feel like with so much to do, there needs to be more time to set aside and make a plan.
Making a plan allows you to work out mistakes on paper instead of making mistakes while doing the work. Planning also forces you to make decisions ahead of time which will help you make better decisions and reduce daily overwhelm.
2. Prepare for time off work.
Make sure you put in your time-off request early and take care of any issues. Once your time off request is approved, plan for the time you will be away from the office. Prepare ahead of time, ensure that your colleagues know you will be out of the office, and take care of any contingencies that need to be put in place.
3. Decide ahead of time what you will be doing during Q4
The more decisions you make ahead of time, the less overwhelmed you feel in the moment. Remember, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. So, if something is on your to-do list out of obligation, you can choose not to do it or not attend.
The other decisions you can make ahead of time are where you will be spending your time, how much money you will be spending, and how much you will be eating and drinking.
Decisions ahead of time can also be used for who you will be getting gifts for, how much you will spend on gifts, what you will bring to parties, and even what events you want to attend. Having it all on your calendar will help you be in the moment for the things you choose to do.
It is much easier to say no to eating just one more cookie when you plan only to have two cookies that day. Planning these decisions ahead of time also help you feel in control and like you are the director of your life instead of feeling like overeating or busying is something that happened to you.
4. Spend time reflecting on what went well over the year
It is important to reflect on what went well the past year so you can bring those positives with you into the new year.
The end of the year is a great time to reflect on what went well and what didn’t. You can make better decisions for the upcoming year by reflecting on the past year.
5. Carve out extra time for overflow
In the schedule, you make for yourself, ensure you add more time if you run into a problem requiring more time than you set aside.
For example, maybe you decided you would get your aunt a pair of slippers from Target for a Christmas gift and allotted 40 minutes on your calendar for this. But, when you drove to your closest Target, they were out of slippers. So, you had to go fifteen minutes to the next Target to find them, and the task took you an hour and a half instead of the initial 40 minutes. If you didn’t build in buffer time and are already supposed to be on your next task, you will feel chronically behind and like there needs to be more time to get everything done.
That is why creating specific overflow time is crucial so you can take care of things that took longer than initially expected.
A Final Note
These are five ways to prepare for Q4 and lessen the overwhelming and busyness that is typical at the end of the year. I hope that at least one of these tips helps you have a more calm and enjoyable Q4.
