Productivity

The 3 C’s That Waste Your Time

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Time Management To DoSince our time is limited and our to-do lists are long, we can’t afford to have time wasters in our schedule, especially if they also steal our positive energy. Take this opportunity to review how you’re spending the precious minutes in your day. If it includes any of the following “3 C’s,” get rid of them now! You deserve better.

1. Comparing

Having role models is great. Constantly comparing yourself to others to see how you “measure up” is not. There will always be someone who is smarter, richer, or has a fancier job title than you. So what? Judge your accomplishments based on your goals and priorities, not someone else’s.

2. Complaining

Complaining takes away valuable time and energy you could be spending  finding a solution or making the best of a sticky situation. It also brings down the people around you.

3. Criticizing

It’s easy to find the bad in every situation and person. Finding the good becomes easier when you make it a habit. Take a moment to point out the good in something. It takes just as much time as a criticism but puts you in a better mood to plow through the tasks on your to-do list.

Getting rid of these 3 C’s helps free up your time and energy for more useful and productive endeavors. Enjoy!

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This Frog is a Multitasker. Are you?

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time management multitaskerThis week I read an article explaining how a certain breed of frog looks for multitasking when selecting its mate. Oh how similar we are to our amphibian friends in our obsession with doing more than one thing at a time!

The truth is, while multitasking sounds important and necessary, we need to separate what is possible and productive from what is eroding the quality of our work. Try these tips to “toad-ally” revamp your approach to multitasking (Ouch. That pun hurt. You’re welcome.)

1. Don’t kid yourself

I can hold a coffee and my computer, conduct a conference call, eat a sandwich, and roll a suitcase through the airport…for about 5 seconds before I fall flat on my face in a puddle of nonfat double shot mocha. Multitasking might be possible, at least for a little bit, but eventually it produces lower quality, distracted work, which can lead to oversight and disaster. Don’t convince yourself that your constant multitasking is producing the same results as focused work.

2. Do many things, but let them take their turn

Just because you fill many different roles and responsibilities, doesn’t mean you have to attend to them all at one time. Sometimes people say, “I have to multitask, I’m constantly juggling multiple projects at once.” Great! But that doesn’t mean you have to jump haphazardly from one to the next and attempt multiple different tasks at once. You can still maintain the appearance of a multitasker by hyper-focusing on one project at a time, even if it means tackling several projects in the same day.

3. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

With the rise of smartphones, people essentially have a small computer in their pockets constantly, which makes multitasking seem much more feasible. Just because you can do two things at once, doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient, productive, and focused use of your time. Before you split your attention, ask yourself: “Am I doing two things because I must or because I can?”

In our on-the-go society, occasional multitasking is inevitable, but the more we strive for singular focus rather than split distraction, the better.

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Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net

Why Urgent Is Easy But Planning Is Hard

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Time Management UrgentWhen you stare at your to-do list, you subconsciously look for three things:

Tasks that are easy
Tasks that are urgent and
Tasks that are important.

When only one task stands out as fitting all of those categories, deciding what to do first is a no-brainer. On the other hand, when everything feels urgent, we have a stressful problem I like to call “Priority Paralysis,” but what about when nothing feels urgent? Here are three reasons an urgent-free to-do list can be a problem and what to do about it!

1. We don’t know what to do first

Urgent vs non-urgent tasks make prioritizing easy, but if “urgent” is the only thing you look for when deciding which task to tackle, what happens when nothing presents an urgent deadline? You don’t know what to do first! This is why The Time Diet is based on categorizing. Pick a Meat task (difficult) Vegetable task (easy) and Dessert task (fun) to focus on during your day. That gives you some parameters to help structure your schedule in a way that ensures you’ll get ahead on your non-urgent tasks while maintaining balance in your day.

2. We’re likely to procrastinate

Another problem with an urgent-free to-do list is that we’re tempted to do nothing! It’s easy to procrastinate when none of our deadlines are urgent at the moment. Remember, if you only deal with tasks when they are urgent, that ensures that you’ll always be faced with a last minute stressful time crunch. Try scheduling “start dates” in your calendar for each “due date.” It’s easy to say we’ll begin something later, but a start date defines exactly when “later” is.

3. We waste time

When we aren’t up against the pressure of an urgent deadline, it’s easy to allow Time Killers to distract us. When people thrive on the pressure of a deadline, it’s often because there is  less time to be distracted and it forces them to focus and work more efficiently. This concept is called Parkinson’s Law, which says that work expands to fill the time we give it. Try removing Time Killers (smartphone, Facebook, etc…) even while you complete non-urgent work so you finish faster.

A non-urgent to-do list is definitely something to celebrate, but not ignore. You’ll never eliminate last-minute time crunch crises, but by efficiently organizing your non-urgent tasks, you’ll be able to decrease the amount of time spent up against a deadline.

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Time Management Book for Students

Time Management Book for Students

5 Things To Do In 30 Minutes Per Day

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Time Management 30 MinutesIf you absolutely needed to, could you find an extra 30 minutes in your day? That extra half an hour might not seem like much, but if you make the time each day, it can add up to a lot over time! It might mean getting up a little earlier, finding more focus in your day, or cutting down on your social media/internet surfing time. However you find it, here are 5 things you can do in those 30 extra minutes that produce big results.

1. Get in Shape

I know, I know. We never have enough time to exercise. Why not use those 30 minutes to work out at home? You’ll save time by not driving to and from the gym. Try this 30-minute at home workout, or one of the many others available online.

2. Learn a Skill

Have you always wanted to learn to play the piano? Or be more proficient at Excel or Photoshop? Why not learn? “How-to” information has never been more readily available. Either buy a book and slowly work your way through it, or use an online course website such as Udemy to learn things you never thought you’d have time for.

3. Follow Up

It’s easy to get lost in the quagmire of a full inbox and forget to reach out to contacts we’ve met recently. Why not use those 30 minutes to follow up with new people and keep in touch with old friends or clients. Staying in touch is the only way to maximize your ever-growing network.

4. Accomplish a “Some Day” Task

Have you always wanted to write a book? Organize your garage? Re-finish that furniture? Huge tasks like this seem daunting, so we continue to put them off until “some day.” In reality, “some day” doesn’t have to be one 24-hour time period. Use your 30 minutes a day to tackle one tiny piece of that task at a time. You’ll be surprised how quickly you’re finished!

5. Clean

Who in the world has time to devote a whole day to housecleaning? Use your new-found 30 minutes to tackle a few tasks each day. Perhaps one day you clean the bathrooms, another day you vacuum, another day deal with clutter, etc… It’s much easier to stay on top of cleaning when you set aside tiny bits of time for it in your schedule than when you wait for it to get overwhelming.

Where will YOU find your 30 minutes a day and what will you do with it?

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3 Crucial Things Busy People Know

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“If you want something done, ask a busy person.” Even though that statement seems so backwards, we all know it to be true. People with packed schedules always find the time to squeeze in one more thing. But is it possible to harness that level of efficiency without a crammed calendar? Absolutely. You just have to learn the time management secrets that busy people know.

1. We have more time than we realize

Much like people on a diet account for each calorie they consume, busy people account for each minute of their time. They know about Parkinson’s Law, that work expands to fill the time we have available, and therefore don’t give themselves two hours to get ready in the morning, or an hour and half to check email. When they sit down to work, they work efficiently and with the utmost focus, eliminating Time Killers that try to make their task take longer.

2. Don’t wait to want to do something

Sometimes there are tasks on our list that we aren’t looking forward to doing. When we don’t want to do something, we put it off hoping we’ll feel more like doing it tomorrow…as though enjoyment of a task was a necessary prerequisite. Busy people don’t think like that. They know their time is limited and it’s better to just do undesirable tasks now and get them off their plates and off their minds.

3. Put your head down and start grazing

Busy people know that worrying about a big workload is a waste of resources. Remember the story about the two cows:

“Two cows were both faced with an immense pasture of grass to graze. The first cow looked around and said, ‘Oh my goodness. There is so much grass here. How will I ever get through it all?’ While the first cow stood and worried, the second cow said nothing, and put her head down and started grazing.”

If we spend less time worrying and more time doing we not only lower our stress level, but we find that worrying was taking up a lot of time and energy that we could have spent on being productive.

The point of working efficiently is not to make time for even more work. The point of working efficiently is to get our work done quickly, so we can have more time for the enjoyable Desserts in life that are truly important.

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Training Your Eye to See Progress

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When we sit down to work, we feel most productive when the task in front of us gets smaller. We thrive on the satisfaction of watching it shrink. But what happens when the task seems to get bigger as we work? This can be a huge de-motivator in our time management if we don’t make a few easy alterations to our expectations.

Changing Your Expectations

These types of expectations aren’t just reserved for working. I discovered a similar scenario when pulling into my driveway yesterday. In Arizona, you need two types of grass on your lawn during the year: summer and winter. The summer grass can withstand the triple digit temperatures, but won’t do well in the winter. When I came home yesterday, I noticed that my front yard was a disaster. All of the grass was brown and it looked like the gardeners were tearing it up. My whole community looked like a barren dust bowl.

To an outsider, it would look like we had a gardening nightmare on our hands. But a trained eye knows better. A trained eye, who has lived in a desert climate, knows that this is a sign of progress. You must let the summer grass go dormant before you over-seed for winter, even though the process might look a little ugly.

Training Your Eye

A trained eye knows what progress looks like, even if the initial stages of progress look a little…messy. Once you’ve completed a big task a few times, you’ll start to recognize what the early signs of progress look like. To an untrained observer, it may look like a messy disaster, but you’ll know differently. You’ll know that sometimes tasks need to look bigger before they can look smaller and that if done correctly, it’s all part of the process.

Patience

This of course takes patience. Sometimes we get frustrated that a task doesn’t appear to be going away and we’ll try to rush the process. Imagine if my community gardeners didn’t get the summer grass out of the way before putting the winter grass down. Initially it might seem that everyone’s lawns look neater, but we’ll be stuck with brown piles of straw when winter hits. Don’t skip steps when completing your big tasks in an effort to make them look “done” faster.

Know that progress doesn’t always look like we think it should and sometimes tasks must seem bigger before they can get smaller and eventually be completed.

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Shifting Gears from Plan to Do

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Careful planners are often good time managers. They look before they leap, they aim before they fire, and they research before they implement. However, good ideas can easily stall out in the planning phase if we don’t eventually change gears into implementation. Knowing when to stop planning and start implementing is a key component of efficient time management. Don’t let these three factors hold you back.

3 Things That Slow Down Implementation

1. Fear of the Unknown

When we are trying something new, our lack of knowledge on the subject can be paralyzing. We may know so little about a new process or project, that we might not even know what we don’t know. In other words, finding out what questions to ask might be even more difficult than finding the answers to those questions. In this case, it’s important to set a goal for your background research so you don’t lose hours of productivity in unrelated Google searches. Set a goal of finding 5 essential questions you need answered in order to begin your task. Then, once you find the answers to those questions, move to implementation. When we know nothing it’s tempting to try to learn everything before beginning something new. However, much of the new knowledge you’ll acquire comes from the implementation process itself.

2. Fear of Failure

Sometimes when we get stuck in the planning phase, it’s because we are afraid of failing. The planning stage is safe. We feel productive without actually implementing anything. The “doing” is much scarier. I could sit here and recite oft-quoted, cliché advice about “failing forward” or how “the toughest journeys begin with one step” or how many times Thomas Edison failed before inventing the light bulb…but you’ve heard that all before. For me, I try to just embrace the fear rather than avoid it. Convert the fear to adrenaline. I’ve never parachuted out of an airplane before, but I would imagine that if people are afraid of jumping when they get into the plane, they are probably still afraid when they are about to take that first, big looooong step out of it. Do you trust your training, instructors and parachute and jump anyway? Or let the fear hold you back. (Parachutes…overcoming fear…oh goodness. I’m starting to sound like a motivational speaker)

3. Lack of Confidence

The final thing that leaves us stuck in the planning stages is our own lack confidence in our ability to complete the task. This is where I’m supposed to tell you that you can do anything if you just believe in yourself. Here is the thing: if you’ve done all your research, planned as much as you can and embraced the fear of starting something new, you now have three options:

1. Implement

2. Delegate

3. Abandon

Nobody really likes to talk about number 3 because it sounds like giving up. However, if after researching a new project, you come to the conclusion that your skill set is better suited for a different kind of task…then find that new task! Not all ideas are good ones and not all people will be successful at all things. The more time you waste on a project you’re never going to finish, the less time you can devote to pursing a task that is much more suited to your goals, abilities, and desires.

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Photo Credit: Flickr

The Big Picture Plan

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A huge part of having good time management skills is getting things done in an efficient manner, however, it’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day planning and lose sight of your overarching goals. Having a big picture plan can help refine your focus and give you the peace of mind that you are on track.

This week I started to get antsy. I’m juggling multiple projects right now and I was starting to feel increasingly worried that I didn’t have a handle on how everything was going to be finished. I was being productive each day, but my days felt disjointed and haphazard. (Sound familiar?)

I knew I needed a clear, big picture plan. I sat down with a calendar and mapped out which projects I was going to be focused on each week. I sketched out my plan all the way through August. Now, I must say, I feel far less anxious about my workload.

Rules for a Big Picture Plan

1) Use a New Sheet of Paper

Your big picture plan can’t be on the same calendar you use to keep track of normal deadlines. That is far too cluttered.

2) Don’t Write Down Every Single Obligation

The purpose of the big picture plan is to show you broad projects to focus on. This is not the place to script out exactly which hours you’ll devote to which project.

3) Try to Pick 1-2 Focus Tasks

No doubt you will still need to juggle multiple tasks at once, but choosing one or two tasks that will be your priority during a set time period really helps to rein in your focus. This doesn’t mean you can’t work on other things. It just means you’ll know what your priorities are.

Here is an example of the tasks I put in my big picture plan for May.

May 1st-5th: Prep Time Diet Workshop

May 6th-14th: School concerts

May 15th– 25th: Record online class videos

May 26th-31st: Work on summer class

What tasks will you add to your big picture plan?

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Photo Credit: Chanpipat

Knowing When to Stop

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Not everything goes according to plan. Few people would disagree with that statement, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to deal with! Planning out your day in advance is an essential part to having great time management skills, but we have to be prepared to quickly adjust the plan when unexpected speed bumps arise in our day.

On Thursday, my husband had a dinner to attend for work. I had a lot of work to finish up so I was really looking forward to having the house to myself and enjoying a productive evening. I had a whole “itinerary” of tasks planned out.

First on my list was editing a track for the school talent show next week (oh the things on an elementary music teacher’s to-do list!) I sat down with my laptop, but quickly became frustrated when I couldn’t get the microphone to work. I should have just stopped and moved on to the next thing on my list but did I? No. Instead, I spent the next hour fighting with technology, Googling tutorials, and restarting my computer. When I finally decided to give up for the evening, I was so frustrated that I ended up watching reruns of the “The Office” to help fight the urge to throw my laptop out the window. So much for my productive evening!

Avoiding Frustration

We work most efficiently when we are motivated, not frustrated. This is why when we hit a major point of frustration with a task it’s sometimes best to walk away, give it a rest, and start something else. However, there is a difference between something being frustrating and something being difficult. If we stop each task when we get to a difficult part, pretty soon we’ll only have the hardest parts of all our work left on our choose-to list. Frustration is different from difficulty. When you’re frustrated, it’s not necessarily because something is hard to do, it’s because something just isn’t clicking. I had used my microphone setup a hundred times, but for some reason it wasn’t working this week. Maybe your technology isn’t working either, or you have a headache or you’re getting irritated with your co-workers. In this case, it’s best to just walk away and come back to it later before your frustration consumes all of your desire to be productive.

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