Something that I have noticed since coming out of lockdown is that we all seem to be very time poor again. Our pre-corono lives are starting to return to some of normality and our diaries are suddenly needed to be used again. I myself have noticed that my calendar seems to just keep filling and filling as I have less and less time in the day.
Those looong 24 hour days have disappeared and I am back to my ‘theres not enough hours in the day’ routine. But with a busy schedule, comes the inherent need to keep on top of your time management and tackle each task to the best of your ability. So I thought I would share my best time management techniques for the time poor, 21st century woman, like myself.
Be Honest With Yourself
Do you sit down in the morning, writing out your to do list, only to realise that you have 30 tasks on there which are most likely never going to get done? Same.
Setting yourself unrealistic expectations of what you are going to achieve in a day is only going to set yourself up for failure. Be honest with yourself. Be realistic with yourself. Be kind to yourself.
Write out all the tasks you would like to achieve in a day and then highlight the most important or pressing matters. Focus on those and aim to get those done before anything else. If you still have time to tackle other tasks, amazing! But don’t beat yourself up for not even getting started with them, celebrate the tasks you did manage to get done.
Say Goodbye To Perfectionism
I am a self confessed perfectionist. I want everything to be done perfectly and if not, well all hell breaks loose. Something I have learnt in my much busier schedule is that perfectionism is the enemy of productivity. It eats away at it and puts up one giant barrier between you and the satisfying tick on that to-do.
Say goodbye to perfectionism and accept ‘good enough’. Trust me when I say that the good enough attitude has saved me countless hours, countless headaches and meant that I can get so much more done in a day.
Track Your Time
One of my biggest downfalls when I started having to up my productivity is that half the time, I had no idea how long a task was going to take me. Sure, I can wash my hair in 10 mins. Suuuure I can pop to the supermarket, the post office and the bank in an hour. Suuuuuuuuuure I can film and edit a video in one afternoon.
Stop.
Stop guessing time schedules and actually track how long it takes you to do a task. That way, when you start to get a better understanding of timings, you can be much more realistic of what you can achieve in a day, how long it’ll take you and what to expect of yourself.
Work Smarter, Not Harder.
A really hard lesson to learn is that being busy is not the same as being productive. You may not have sat down all day but that doesn’t mean that all of your ‘busy’ time spent that day was productive. Cut out the things that are known distractions. I regularly delete twitter off my phone because it’s one of those platforms I can sit and scroll for hours on, and before I know it I’ve wasted precious time that I could have been working on my next to do on.
Learn what distracts you and cut it out so that you can work smarter, not harder.
