Module four time management. Another way of thinking of physical awareness is being aware of how you deploy yourself in your environment. This can be your work environment, your home environment and any other environment in which you are engaged. Life in the early 21st century is fast paced and in order to effectively engage with the overall environment, you must become aware of how you spend your time and how to maximize that time. Organization. One important aspect of Time management is getting organized.
If you constantly have to spend time finding things or apologize for missing important events, chances are, you're disorganized. One first step to becoming organized is to organize your physical space. For those of us who are messy creative types, this can be daunting. Maybe you have let a small mess pile up into a big one. But if you break the task into smaller tasks and tackle these in turn, it can seem far less daunting. Taking the time to clean up is well worth it because it saves you time and makes you feel less stressed over the long run.
Remaining organized requires patience. tenuous maintenance but if you keep to it, then small jobs never get an opportunity to snowball into humongous ones. Before you leave your workplace making sure everything is tidy is one way to avoid things piling up. Another step is to designate a time to clean on a weekly basis. In addition to organizing your space to truly become adept at organizing your time, you must first understand how you use your time normally without any intervention. One way to do this is to write down how you spend each hour of your day before you go to sleep.
Do this for a week and it will become clear which areas in your life are being managed and efficiently. Keep in mind that there are varying degrees of managing your time. Some people use lists or sticky notes to remind themselves of what needs to be done. Others use day planners and schedule every moment of their lives in a calendar. Goal management if you consider improving your time management as a process, then one of the big aspects of that process is to set goals when you break down a large task into smaller tasks you are engaged in goal setting behavior, even if on a small scale. In order to be effective at setting and reaching goals, it is helpful to use the smart acronym specific.
When you establish a specific goal rather than a general one you are far more likely to follow through. measurable. One of the reasons for making a goal specific is so you can measure what the successful completion of that goal looks like, achievable. If a goal is too easy, it can also be easy to justify giving up on it because it's not important enough. Make sure you set goals that are challenging but achievable. realistic.
While being ambitious can help you to achieve large goals being too ambitious can often lead to rebellion. If your goal is something nearly impossible, such as piloting a spaceship to Neptune, you will have several opportunities to give up. Time targeted. When you decide on setting a goal you must also decide on when you expect to achieve that goal. You must be specific. This allows you to organize your goal achieving behavior with a deadline and it addition to being smart about goal setting, there are some other steps you can take that will help you remain committed to achieving your goal.
Tell someone else about your goal. This will help to keep you accountable and committed. when appropriate, divide your goal into smaller milestones. When you reach a milestone reward yourself. Small rewards can help you to stay enthusiastic. If you fail to meet a milestone, don't use this as an occasion to beat yourself up or to give up.
Instead, determine where and how you failed and how to avoid doing so in the future. Most importantly, don't give up. Perhaps the single most important step is to choose a goal that is meaningful to you. priorities. When you have clear goals, it becomes easier to set priorities. No matter how simple or complicated a task, anything worth accomplishing won't happen all at once.
When you begin to manage your time effectively you must be able to prioritize. One important thing that tends to slip through the cracks when it comes to prioritization is scheduling time to have fun and relax In order to be effective and creative, you need time to unwind in time to play. Here are three different strategies for prioritizing your tasks. Eat a frog. This first suggestion comes from a book of the same title by Brian Tracy. Essentially, this means that at the beginning of each day, you pick the hardest, most tedious tasks to first.
Whatever task you have before you that is the one you're looking forward to the least do that one first. When you go with this method of prioritizing, keep in mind that over planning or trying to get yourself enthused over it are often subtle ways to procrastinate, instead just dig in and Eat That Frog. Big stuff first. before you go to sleep, write down the three most important things you need to get done by the end of tomorrow. Leave the list beside your bed so that when you wake in the morning, it's there as a reminder, once you complete your big tasks, you can then spend time on smaller ones. Covey quadrants.
Self Help guru Stephen Covey advises that you organize your priorities with the assistance of a sheet of paper that you divide into four quadrants Q one stands for important and urgent tasks such as crises. Q two stands for important but not urgent tasks the type of things you need to do, but they have less rigid or approaching deadlines. Q three stands for unimportant but urgent tasks. Things such as answering the phone or going to a meeting you for stands for unimportant and non urgent tasks, the types of things you feel better about doing once the more pressing work is done. According to Covey, it's inevitable that you will have to spend time working on key one tasks, but the more adept you become at managing your time, the more you will be able to spend on q2 tasks. While it's important to take time to play a queue for tasks Usually, it's best to engage in q3 and q4 tasks when you have already handled the others.
Procrastination. The biggest bugbear to managing your time well is procrastination. Often we procrastinate when we are faced with a task that we perceive as difficult or unpleasant. Another search Since it lends itself to procrastination is when the reward for a completed task is delayed. If we know that Upon finishing a difficult task, we will get an immediate promotion. It motivates us more so than if that promotion will occur at a later point.
Procrastination functions as an impulse towards feeling good immediately. And according to psychologists, it originates from a time when human activities were more immediate and involve less planning. Many great strategies for fighting procrastination have been listed previously, such as breaking a large task into a bunch of small tasks, or organizing your work area and keeping it clutter free. Other strategies will be addressed in future modules such as mindfulness meditation as a method for strengthening your will. Here are some additional strategies. Eliminate distraction, playing on Facebook or checking your email are two common ways in which you can procrastinate.
By eliminating the temptation you eliminate the possibility of giving into an impulse. It's not enough to simply have the page minimized on your computer desktop. You may have to close your email program or your browser or this Connect from the internet all together. If talking or texting on your cell phone is a way that you procrastinate and turn it off. When you have a task to perform, you can turn it back on and check your messages as a reward for finishing your task. When organizing your workspace, make sure that you have eliminated the types of things that you might use in order to procrastinate.
Use the buddy system. Having someone who is aware of the tasks you have laid out in front of you and who has tasks themselves can be helpful for holding each other accountable. Take care not to let your updates and check ins with your buddy become occasions for procrastination themselves. Except that things are likely to be imperfect. Our tendency to strive for perfection often results in feelings of anxiety over the fact that we might not get it right. And such emotions are great breeding grounds for procrastination.
Avoid over complicating matters. Well this might look as if you are breaking a large task into smaller tasks, each with their individual deadlines. spending too much time organizing can quickly become an exercise in avoiding the task at hand. Keep in mind that our tendency is to overestimate the amount of time that a task will take. This overestimation makes it easier to justify procrastination. When you find yourself thinking that you have plenty of time to complete a task, remind yourself that you are probably exaggerating.
Try setting a timer for 25 minutes. During that time, you will do nothing but the task at hand. This can be helpful for two reasons. It's easier to use willpower for short periods of time, such as a 25 minute limit, and some work will create its own momentum where you won't want to stop after the 25 minutes are up. If taking a lot of breaks as part of your procrastination game, this technique isn't the best. But if you have problems getting started, this can be quite helpful.