Did you ever feel that there are people who can do everything they want to without getting short of time? If yes you must have wondered how they manage their time so perfectly. It’s actually possible to do a lot of things done in a day without getting stressed at all. Let’s know how you can manage your time wisely for a healthy life.
- Did you ever feel to have more hours in the day?
- Do you wonder where your time flies and you are not aware of what you’re actually doing with your time?
- Do you often find yourself completing tasks and chasing timelines both at home and at work?
- Do you find it difficult to set personal boundaries and say ‘no’ to required people?
- Do you often question how to streamline your life and better handle the clutter in your life?
- Do you feel constantly nagged by the idea that you’ve forgotten to do something, but are not sure what it is?
Well, most likely you lack the skills to manage your time better. Spending long hours at work regularly does not always indicate hard work. In fact, it may indicate ineffectiveness and lack of efficiency. A study by the Productivity Institute has shown that “20% of the average workday is spent on “crucial” and “important” things, while 80% of the average workday is spent on things that have “somewhat little value” or “no value at all.”
Time is the self-consuming resource that each one of us has in equal measure and that cannot be altered, augmented, or controlled. Time Management is not as much about managing time as it is about managing oneself with respect to time. It is an individual’s approach to life that influences how they utilize or waste their time.
As Bruce Lee once said, “We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever”.
Manage Your Time Wisely for a Healthy Life — A Paradigm Shift
There is overwhelming evidence to prove that we all are busier than ever. We all are always in a hurry to start or end things. We all struggle daily with some unfinished tasks which we postpone to the next day. All this leads to discontent, stress, and potentially a conflict impacting your health and life.
However, there are a few who manage to make the most of the 24 hours in a day. These are the people who do not spend time but utilize it. They have the art of managing time.
Time management is all about controlling the way we use our time, identifying factors and activities that contribute to the wastage of time, and then minimizing or eliminating them. There is a paradigm shift from spending time to utilizing it, from being busy to achieving results.
Need of Time Management – Its Benefits
The need can be understood from the benefits of time management. Time management is all about utilizing our time to achieve maximum results with minimum effort. If implemented correctly, it makes us both efficient and effective. In addition to enhancing personal effectiveness, time management also helps us to:
- Work in a goal-oriented, focused, and effective way
- Reduce stress
- Minimize rework
- Achieve work-life balance
- Be Happier!
Do’s and Don’ts to Manage Your Time Wisely for a Healthy Life
Here are some do’s and don’ts to manage your time effectively.
Do’s:
- Set a SMART goal (i.e your goals should be –Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time-Bound) – Whether it is a short-term goal such as delivering a project or a long-term goal such as learning a skill, setting a goal is crucial to achieving that goal.
- Create a plan –A plan turns the vision into action. Good planning is essential to meet a goal in a time-bound manner. A plan not only gives a start to the effort but also helps allocate resources and time for each activity in the critical action plan.
- Prioritize your tasks – Prioritization is the key to effective time management. It means identifying what is more important and needs to be done immediately, versus what can be done later or best assigned/delegated to others.
- Use technology wisely – The social networking sites, web, emails, etc can be a distraction or bliss depending on how they are used. Instead of remaining distracted by wasteful activities on the time-sucking websites, look for tools to help you schedule your time judiciously.
- Do the difficult stuff first! If you have something hard to do, sort it out first and get it off your plate. This helps to not worry about it the rest of the day.
- Monitor progress – It is equally important to monitor progress against set milestones within the plan regularly to speed up or slow down the pace of work or reallocation and reprioritization.
- Schedule time for productive stuff – Make more time for things you enjoy and want to do like traveling, adventure activities, exercise, recreation.
- Learn to say ‘no’ – When you don’t want to pursue something or don’t have the time to do it, learn to say ‘no’ politely and firmly to remain focused on your goals.
- Practice multitasking. Instead of combining things like talking and driving at the same time, multitask activities you can do together that aren’t dangerous.
Don’ts:
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Avoid procrastination – The single biggest deterrent to Manage Your Time Wisely for a Healthy Life is procrastination. You can overcome procrastination in certain ways:
- Identify why you are procrastinating.
- Break the mental blocks.
- Visualize the successful completion of a task while being in a relaxed state.
- Once the reason is identified, develop strategies to overcome procrastination.
- Identify and acknowledge distractions – While you perform your routine task at work or at home, there are many distractions such as phone calls, emails, visitors, meetings, unplanned tasks, and many more. You can avoid some of these, but a few will remain unavoidable.
- Avoid barriers to time management – There is a natural tendency to indulge in common interruptions like telephone conversations, e-mails, drop-in visitors, lack of priorities, etc. All these barriers often get into activities without really planning for them. This leaves us with many incomplete tasks and the important ones get left out.
- Avoid reading unsolicited e-mails. E-mails that don’t concern you or aren’t something you need to know, get rid of them by deleting them, not responding, set time aside for late action.
- Avoid being a perfectionist – It is important to pay attention to details in things you do, however, avoid paying excessive attention to details that bring stress or discontent.
In a Nutshell
Time management helps us spend the ‘required’ time to achieve more goals, instead of spending all our time trying to complete tasks. If you put first things first, you can spend relatively more time on activities that are important. Something as simple as “knowing where your keys are in the morning, knowing where your kid’s library book or homework is, will reduce a lot of stress and better manage your stressful busy life.
