Time Well Spent: Practical Strategies for Maximising Your Day
Hi Team,
You may have noticed a fresh look to this week’s newsletter – I’m excited to announce a rebrand, as I take these articles forward under my own name, while keeping the content you know and love.
Do you often feel like time is slipping away from you? Lost time can have a negative impact on our growth journey, but it can also be resolved through planning. Today, we’ll dive into the skill of mastering time management to achieve personal growth, so that you can make the most of your days.
Addressing Enemies of Flow
The first step in mastering our time management is to address any enemies of flow, which may be impacting the way that we spend our time. Look through previous days, where you have felt that time has been lost, to see what the major distractions are. If you are finding that you are distracted, hone into what type of distractions you face and remove as many of these as possible. Creating a clean, distraction-free workspace where technology is silenced is essential for entering a state of flow. By starting with a clear focus on where you are losing time, the other steps will have a greater chance of success.
Not To-Do List
A not to-do list is a prioritisation method to determine what goals we will be placing on a waiting list for the future. This is the point where you need to decide what items you want to focus on right now and any that don’t make that list will go onto your not to-do list. To be clear, a not to-do list should not be a graveyard for goals; it’s a powerful tool for maintaining focus. A major achievement in mastering time management is prioritisation, which means that realistic goals need to be set. Having this type of fixed volume approach to your personal growth will set you out for success.
Time-Blocking
Now that we have addressed our enemies of flow and know what we are looking to achieve, we can set out our calendar through time-blocking. This time management strategy gets you to schedule every part of your day into a calendar, whether that’s digital or physical. You want to break down every block of time, to give an example of where you are going to be spending each segment on the calendar. A recommendation is to use colours to group your tasks, so that you can quickly see the area in which time will be spent. Time-blocking is an effective method as it forces you to make conscious decisions about where your time goes, ensuring that you will be able to maximise your time to achieve results.
Run Small Experiments
With the above steps in place, the final piece of the time management jigsaw is to run small experiments to find what works best for you. For example, you may look to experiment with different techniques – try blocking time for deep work in the morning or tackling your most challenging tasks first. Then take the time to reflect and review each week on what works. As always, it is about keeping this process of time management fluid, with an open approach to adapt, so that you may have the optimum outcomes.
Closing Remarks
Once you can master time management, the steps that are needed for personal growth become much easier. By tackling our distractions, appreciating our priorities, blocking our time and running the experiments to know what works best for us, we are well on the path to achieve consistent results.
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