Time is the most precious thing you own. It is the only thing in your life that you cannot get more of, no matter how hard you try. It is finite.
To put this into perspective, I recently came across a visual aid to plot out how many weeks of your life you have lived and how many you have left to live, and the results were quite shocking and pushed me into a frenzy to live my life to the maximum!
The theory is written in a blog post by Tim Urban called Your Life in Weeks. It can be located by clicking on the visual below if you would like to delve more into the detail. To paraphrase the article, Tim discusses that the average person lives for 90 years, and that equates to only 4,680 weeks, and this is not many weeks at all. It delves deeper into visualising how many weeks the average person spends in various stages of their life such as in education, in their career and in retirement, as well as plotting interesting information such as in which week in Isaac Newton’s life he developed the law of gravity.
A lack of time is something I am very aware of. I personally have had over the years a very unhealthy relationship with time and have always struggled to understand how long it takes to complete certain tasks. I am unable to comprehend how quickly time just seems to pass me by in the blink of an eye. I have spent much time improving my relationship with time over the last few years and have picked up some great tips in the process, which I would like to share.
Tips For Effectively Planning and Maximising Your Time
1. Set your goals – Sit down and spend some time thinking about what is important to you and what your goals are. Write them down to make them real goals, not just lofty ideas in your head. Once you have them memorialised in writing, start setting milestones or sub-goals with high level plans of how and by when you will achieve those milestones and ultimately the goal. Check in periodically to measure how you are tracking against your goals. Writing goals down gives you focus on what is important to you and will give you clarity. It will allow for you to assess all those outstanding items you haven’t got around to doing to figure out if they are aligned with your goals. If not, bin them or delegate them (see tip 6).
2. Prioritise – Following on from tip 1, prioritise your goals and milestones based on what will give you the greatest return on your time investment in the long run and work on that goal as priority. To help with prioritising tasks, there is a useful tool you can use called The Eisenhower Matrix. This tool helps you to determine what tasks to prioritise based on how urgent and how important the task is and allows for you to consider each task for its true value to you. Below is a link to a great blog post giving further details on the tool.
3. Set a daily plan – This is more than a to-do list, this is a plan for the day. A daily plan should be used to not only plan out your tasks, but also allow for you to figure out when you are able to do those tasks in the day to try and ensure you are not overcommitting yourself. There are so many digital and manual planners around, even a blank notebook will suffice, whatever works well for you. Break down your tasks into bitesize chunks and group similar tasks together to maximise your time. Make sure that every task in your daily plan is specific and actionable. An example, if you need to collect a parcel from the post office, don’t just write “Post Office” on your task list, write “Collect parcel from Mum from the post office”. This is both specific and actionable. This way, you will not have to spend any time figuring out why “Post Office” was on your list in the first place, you will already know upfront that you have an action to go to the post office to collect a parcel. This is particularly useful if you tend to plan ahead a few days/weeks, as our brains have a tendency to forget what we meant when we are vague.
4. Time blocking – Time blocking is a useful method to use to get tasks completed and making sure that you don’t overcommit your time. I will be writing a detailed blog post on time blocking over the next couple of weeks, but as an overview, time blocking is a method of booking in a “meeting” with yourself for a fixed amount of time to allow for you to focus on completing predefined tasks and activities. You can do this digitally using your calendar app, or manually in a diary. I personally use a paper planner as I don’t trust myself to not get distracted by my phone. I also like that a paper planner is tangible and visible and harder to ignore than the calendar app on my phone. I use this method when I have a particularly busy day ahead of me and need to make sure I am maximising my available time to its full potential.
5. Timers – Time has a habit of disappearing if you are not mindful. Timers are your best friend to keep on top time, to make sure it is not running away from you. If you know you cannot trust yourself to not get distracted with your phone when using timers on it, consider purchasing a manual timer. I personally use a visual timer that I purchased from Amazon for about £10 which shows at a glance how much time I have left. Search visual timer on Amazon. I also use my timer effectively to do tasks I don’t want to do, and make it into a game to finish before the timer chimes. An example of this is doing the ironing (not my favourite job at all)!
6. Delegate everything you can – Look to delegate any task that you can to free up more time for yourself to focus on what is important to you. If you have family and friends around you, look to barter with them over tasks – they may really like doing a task you dislike and vice versa, so it can be beneficial to both parties to agree to swap certain tasks. If you have the funds available, look at outsourcing certain tasks such as getting cleaners in to do your housework or paying someone to do your ironing for you.
7. Purge time wasters from your life – Lots of things can waste your time, whether that be people or your phone or the TV. Attempt to limit your exposure to things that waste your time, or set clear boundaries upfront as to how much time you are willing to spend being distracted. For example, if someone calls you who you know likes to talk for over an hour, tell them upfront you are busy but happy to talk for 15 minutes but will have to go after the 15 minutes is up so you can continue with what you were doing.
If you have any tips on maximising your time that you would like to share with the community, please leave a comment 😊
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