You can’t manage time. Stop trying.
Hopefully, you’ve learned that by now. It’s impossible to manage time because time is fixed. You cannot take an hour from today and give it to tomorrow. You get twenty-four hours each day in which to squeeze in everything you want to or need to do: sleep, eat, shower, exercise, work.
And that is a good starting point. Once you understand that time is not manageable, then the only variable is activity — what you do in your allotted twenty-four hours is what you have to work with.
Most people damage their overall effectiveness because they try to squeeze too much into their day. The reality is, you have a lot more to do than you have time available, so you need to get strategic about what you do each day.
Taking care of yourself and your needs should be priority number one.
Your health, learning and planning are too important not to be given a dedicated amount of time each day. Neglect these areas, and you will quickly find yourself on a downhill spiral. These should form part of your daily routines: morning routines for your learning and health, and evening routines for your planning, for example.
When it comes to your work, the only decision you can make is what to work on today. Of course, if you have done a weekly planning session, you will have a plan to work from, but life will always throw the unexpected at you, and you have to deal with those when they come up. But ultimately, it is your plan for the week that will drive your accomplishments.
If you are not planning the week, the time you think you have each day will quickly fill up with other people’s priorities. If you work in an environment where dealing with other people’s urgencies is your role, then you will need to allocate sufficient time each day to deal with that. You want to avoid deluding yourself about how much time you think you have. If you are not strict about allocating those hours, you will find they fill up with the unimportant and unnecessary.
However, if you plan your day and are realistic about what you can accomplish each day, you will soon find astonishing things happen. Starting your day with two objectives and eight “should-do” tasks gives you a plan for the day. It eliminates a lot of time-wasting procrastination, and it gives you a focus for the day.
So commit yourself today. Commit to giving yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of each day this week to plan out your ten most important tasks for tomorrow. Then, when you start the day, start from the top and through the day, do whatever you can to clear your ten tasks.
At the end of the week, look at what you accomplished. You will be amazed at what a little planning and focus can do for you.
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