Time Management Activities

Activities to help you find more time

Time management activities -

We have collected some great activities that help people find more time. We would like to share many of these with you. Where possible the resources are complimentary.

Based on the feedback from our clients and readers here are 3 activities that will help you get control of your time.

Our 3 most useful Time Management Activities are:

1. Create an ideal week outline/structure

2. Plan the following week every Friday and refine your plan each day

3. Know your capacity

Create an Ideal Week structure/outline

What would a perfect week look like for you? A week where you got all your key tasks done (not everything, but you key tasks). A week where you got time to see you loved ones. A week where you did some exercise and other activities to keep you healthy. A week where you spent time doing some of the things you love to do.

That sort of a week is what we call an ideal week. A great time management activity is to create this week on paper, using our weekly structure form. When you get clear about what an ideal week looks like you are much more likely to have one.

Download the weekly structure time management form and look at the example. Then use the blank sheet to fill in what an ideal would look like for you. Most people find they need at least 3 or 4 attempts at this to get close to what they really want.

Plan Each Week the Friday before

The second of our time time management activities produces amazing changes according to our clients. Many people get more sleep, reduce stress, feel better about going to work on Monday and have much more fun on the weekend. How can a time management activity help you achieve al of this?

It seems that getting clear about where you are with your work tasks, then getting clear what you are going to work on next week and writing it down is like a downlaod for your mind. I'll use a computer analogy to help explain. Not planning is like having every document you worked on during the week still open and unsaved. The computer has to stay on constantly checking every document and "autosaving" every few minutes, in "fear" of an event that will cause the loss of all that information. Planning is like saving all your documents and shutting the computer down, happly knowing it will all be there when you turn it on Monday morning.

Schedule 45 mins early Friday afternoon. Review what you have achieved in the week and what is still incomplete. Plan when you will do the incomplete tasks next week (you can use the blank weekly structure time management form).

Know your Capacity

The third of our time management activities is something most people have not come accross. We refer to capacity in terms of both time and energy. Time capacity is aout how much you can get done in a block of time. We suggest you focus primarily on a week as your main block and a day as your secondary block.

To complete this activity list all the things -- everything, big or little -- you thought you wanted to get done this week in work hours. Then write down how many hours you think you will work this week. Next, allocate how much time time you think they will take, then multiply this by 1.5 to allow for intterruptions. Add in time for travel, time for lunch or other breaks you might have. Add it up and compare that with the hours you thought you would work.

What most people find is that they amount of work they think they can get done is about twice as much as they can actually get done. No wonder you feel like you don't have anytime -- you don't! Now you know your capacity, the idea is to acknowledge what is actually possible in that time and then make sure you do the most important tasks.

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