If you feel like you are always running out of time, you are not alone. Time is scarce. We can’t buy more of it. The problem is, we often don’t spend enough time thinking about how we distribute our precious 24 hours a day. Social media, meetings, responsibilities pop up, slowly taking over our agenda.
When I talk with public servants, one of their biggest struggles to get things done is their lack of time. This blog gives you an easy 5-step process to improve your time management.
1. Identify your priorities
The first and most important step is to identify what you want and why. Think about the things that matter the most to you. Perhaps your family, friends, your work. Now, imagine you have a magic wand, ideally how would you distribute your 24 hours? Don’t overthink it, just write down what an ideal day would look like for you. It could be working only 8 productive hours, sleeping another 8 hours, or making time to have dinner with your family.
2. Time audit
Now that you have identified your ideal day, let’s look at what’s happening on a real day. No judgement here. Imagine you are just an observer – a narrator of a football game. The only thing you have to do is take notes on your phone or on a piece of paper about what you do during the day. For example, at what time you wake up, those extra minutes in bed, the 5 minutes you spend scrolling through social media (that turns into 20 minutes), meetings (planned for 30 minutes and extended to an hour). Just write it down.
3. Categorize your time
Divide your activities into 5 to 7 categories that make sense for you. For example, it could be family, work, friends, social media, personal growth (learning, reading), self-care (sleeping, exercise).
4. Time analysis
Now that you have identified your categories and tracked a day in your life, on a piece of paper write down three columns. The first one will have your categories. The second one, the time you would spend on your ideal day (step 1).The third one, the time you spent in your real day (step 2). It’s time to compare what you would like to do and what you actually do. Are there particular areas that get your attention? Are you spending too much time on an activity without realizing? Is there something you want to improve, start or stop doing? The main objective of this step is to create some awareness of how you spend your time. Most of us will waste time without even realizing we are.
5. Take action
Saying that you will now change everything and adjust your routine to your ideal day isn’t realistic. At least not a change that you can sustain in the long run. So, let’s start small and grow from there. From your time analysis identify one thing that you would like to improve and start with that. Make it something you can fix quickly. Think of the opportunity cost of your time. In other words, if you were not on social media, for example, perhaps you would be playing with your kids or reading a book. What are you giving up for that action?
As you can imagine, the time you spend on your phone or on social media will very likely be good candidates to be reduced. On average, a person spends over 4 hours interacting with his or her phone every day. Here’s one simple action. The next time you are going to pick up your phone, answer these 3 questions: what for? why now? and what instead? (If you are interested in reducing time you are wasting on your phone, try this 3-day free challenge by Catherine Price, author of How to break up with your phone). Time on social media is probably another good candidate.
Final thoughts
This sounds simple, even perhaps an annoying exercise. But believe me, it works. The main objective is to create some awareness of how we are spending our time and more important, what are we giving up because of what we are doing. I’ve done it several times, and I realized how there were things that I completely underestimated (like the time I spent interacting with my phone) and what I was sacrificing because of that. Improving time management is always a work in progress, but it’s worth starting. Time is the only thing you can’t get more of.
Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash
