The Art of Managing Time
By: Muhammad Imran Awan, Corporate, Life & Success Coach, Xponential Coaching
Time is the great equalizer. The people who are most successful in life and the ones who are least successful operate in the same 24-hour time window each day. The difference lies in how effectively each of them consistently uses their available time each day.
One of the biggest challenges that people face with regard to effectively using their time is the feeling of being overwhelmed and the mental state of either having no direction or lack of direction in their life. When a person consistently feels overwhelmed with hundreds of things to do, dozens of ideas to remember, and a bunch of missed commitments and deadlines to catch up they are actually piling up a mental burden that results in continuous loss of focus. And the person who has not set a clear vision or an overall direction for their life, they may be doing a lot of activities and making lots of movement each day, but their life actually does not progress in any specific or the desired direction. Both of these situations result in us being resentful and unhappy about our lives, as time keeps flying while we continue to lack meaning and fulfillment across our personal and professional lives.
Step 1: Offload the Mental Burden:
The very first step towards managing your time effectively is to offload the mental burden. Start by de-cluttering your mind and writing down all important thoughts, ideas, inspirations, and promises on a paper/diary (or a digital notebook). This practice will provide a sense of relief, as you no longer have to carry these thoughts in your mind.
Step 2: Organize and Prioritize:
Once you’ve decluttered your mind, schedule a short daily time slot to review your notes and shortlist the actionable items. Filter out the ones that were merely a quick excitement but don’t align with your values and long-term vision. Then, prioritize your actionable tasks based on their importance and urgency and move those to your daily, monthly, or yearly to-do lists (TDLs). By adopting this approach of structured thinking and prioritization using a paper and pen (or a digital notebook), you’ll feel more in control and less overwhelmed by today’s fast-paced and hyper-distractive lifestyle.
Step 3: Schedule and Execute:
The next step is to free your mind from the fear of forgetting your important tasks and promises by making use of a digital calendar like the one on your smartphone. Scheduling all your major TDL items using a calendar will not only increase your mental bandwidth for more creative thinking but also ensure that you always get reminded ahead of all your important commitments both at work and in your personal life and become a person who always shows up on time. Once everything is well captured, prioritized, and scheduled, now is the time for you to simply focus your energies on what needs to be done at the committed times.
Step 4: Avoid Common Pitfalls
A common pitfall people fall into when using such an organized mechanism of planning and allocating their time is scheduling so many activities back-to-back that there is no buffer left to handle emergencies or to give themselves a breathing space to transition from one engagement to the next. To avoid this, make sure that you never schedule back-to-back meetings or appointments and always leave a gap of 30 minutes to 1 hour for either giving yourself a break or preparing for the next appointment in advance.
The Ultimate Goal: Creating More Free Time
The ultimate goal of time management is not to fill every moment of your life with activity or to lead a fast-paced, busy life. Instead, an effective time management system should allow you to create more free time in your life.
This free time can be used for self-reflection, nurturing relationships, attending to others’ needs, and working on greater causes. It allows you to live a peaceful and steadily progressing life, striking a balance between productivity and personal well-being and giving you a sense of reassurance and ease.
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