I don’t know about you, but I was the kind of person that normally put so much work on my plate that I couldn’t figure out how to handle it all which made it feel as if I was too busy to tend to other things, events, and even other people in my life sometimes. Apparently, this is a time management issue and it’s a skill that you must master rather than a problem of “being too busy”. Let me explain. You may not have control over circumstances and people outside of you, but if you can take control of your own thoughts and feelings to the degree where you can keep yourself stable, calm, and collected even when there is chaos going on around you, you will be able to take back the driver’s seat of your own life and take better control of your time. When you control your time, you control your life.
- The Power of Your Emotions: Pay attention to how you feel and do this frequently. Have you ever noticed that when you are experiencing anxiety, time seems to all of a sudden speed up? It almost feels as if your life is being lived out for you before you even have a chance to join it. Breathing exercises help a lot with this respect as well staying in the present moment to help you relax more. Why is this so important? Because our feelings effect the thoughts we are thinking. Have you ever felt negative emotion (like grief, fear, or anger), but found yourself to be in a super optimistic attitude? Probably not! Now, when you are feeling rushed, for example, you may begin to think thoughts that match the way you feel. Thoughts like “I have 3 essays due this weekend, and I need to make sure I do a great job at it so I can pass my classes. But I also need to take on extra hours at work to pay my bills on time. Not to mention, etc.” and the list can go on and on. Then you may start to think that it will be impossible for you to do all of these things and meet all of your deadlines while keeping your life together at the same time, which will decrease your motivation levels, and we all know what these negative-thinking spirals end up turning into. Not fun! The reason for this is that sometimes we tend to go overboard with what I call our “forward future-oriented thinking”. We’re always thinking about what’s going to happen next, and all of the things that we have to get done after that, and so on and so forth. Soon, we find ourselves with a huge To-Do list which makes us feel even more stressed out and the anxiety of it all makes it hard to even begin working on one of those things on our To-Do list.
- The Mental Traps: This leads me into my next great solution for time management. Technically speaking, time is a just a mental construct. Believe it or not, we get so stuck in our head sometimes that we almost create our own private little mental hell where we are suffering in silence. In this state, we become more concerned with “getting it all done” rather than just doing one thing at a time and taking it easy and actually going with the flow of our lives. When this happens, it means that we need to re-examine our goals, priorities, and desires. If you are spending your time doing everything you think you “have to” do instead of what you want to do and what you truly desire including your goals, you are wasting your time anyway because this will not lead to living a happy life. If what you are doing right now in this moment is something you think you “have to” do for the sake of a future end goal that you are reaching for, it will start to feel as if it is not a choice you yourself are making. That is because you are missing the point. You probably all know and have heard the saying, “Follow your happiness (joy or bliss)”. The logic behind it is that when you are doing what you love and are truly passionate about, other circumstances in your life start to fall into place and you will begin to attract better things into your life. To expand on this further: At the most core fundamental level, we are all energy and energy is what has the power to create. Why waste our energy on doing things we don’t even like or want to do? What people truly value is the end result of your work and what truly matters is your talents and abilities to produce a favorable outcome. But since we’ve been led to believe the lie that what your employer values is your time, for example, we begin to value time in and of itself more than our own interests and life purpose. What a perfect recipe for creating a society full of insecure people who hate their lives! So the point I’m trying to get at is: choose to do at least one thing every single day that you enjoy. I know it is easier said than done, but over time it will soon become a habit and you will experience drastically greater levels of happiness in your day to day life. Discover what your true passions are which will get you that much closer to figuring out your life purpose. Realize that the quality of your creation is what is important rather than how much time you spent doing that thing, because when you are doing what you love it won’t even matter to you how much time it takes for you to do it.
- Being in Tune with Yourself: Align your thoughts with your emotions so that they are “on the same page” so to speak, rather than having your feelings and gut instincts telling you “No” while your mind is telling you “Yes” and having to choose between the two. When this happens, your consciousness splits and this leads to lower levels of self-awareness. Raising your vibration involves not only thinking more positive thoughts and being more optimistic, but also being in tune with your feelings and getting yourself into a better emotional state. Not doing so causes confusion, and when you are lost and confused, it becomes harder for you to discern between illusion and reality. It leads to indecisiveness and ultimately falling behind on important tasks or not being able to keep up with your goals or even your life in general. You will constantly feel like you don’t have enough time to do all of the things you need to. If you are wondering, “Well, how do I do this?” let me describe a couple scenarios where you may not be in tune with your feelings and thoughts enough to make the best decision for yourself on what actions you should or shouldn’t take. For example, if you are depressed because you just experienced the loss of a loved one, acknowledge how you really feel instead of suppressing your emotion and running off to your friend’s birthday celebration. Check in with the thoughts you are thinking often and get into the habit of writing them down. If you are in an extremely pessimistic mindset at the moment due to just having gotten into a car accident, don’t listen to your friend’s advise of “You should just be more positive. Anyway, let’s go to the movies!” I don’t know on how many different occasions I’ve had my feelings and experiences I have shared with a friend be completely gaslighted like this. It may be unintentional on their part, but from my perspective it just makes me want to punch them in the face and not reveal my feelings to them in the future. It makes me feel like they don’t care enough about me or the pain that I am going through. Therefore, I’m not going to basically gaslight myself by listening to one aspect of myself (ex: my mind) while ignoring another part of me (ex: my emotions) or vice versa.
- Prioritizing Your Goals: Stay true to ur priorities – which should depend on your goals. Otherwise, in a sense, you are screwing yourself over and setting yourself up for failure because you aren’t being true to yourself, to your actual values, and to what is truly important to you. It’s easy to get sidetracked and distracted with other things from time to time and that is okay. However, it’s good to remind yourself of your main priorities often, and make adjustments when your top priorities change. My suggestion is to literally write it down in a journal and take note at the end of each day what you have accomplished that day that has gotten you one step closer to your goal(s). For example, if I were to rank my top 3 priorities from most important to less important and they were 1) Improving my health 2) School 3) My finances, I would remind myself of these priorities when I wake up in the morning and reflect again at the end of the day on what I did and see if the actions I took match these priorities. If I find that I constantly spend most of my time watching television and listening to music, I am not staying true to these priorities. In this case, I would change my daily routine to better match my priorities. I could decide to eat more fruits and veggies, work on at least one assignment from each class every day, and search for a more affordable car insurance.
- Scheduling and Planning: My next tip is to get into the habit of scheduling and giving yourself the time to think your actions through before acting on them. This is because first of all, when you act upon negative emotion, it will yield negative results. However, when you act upon inspiration or any other positive emotional state, it will yield favorable results. Secondly, when you plan your day strategically by writing them down and assigning a time slot from the start of your day to the end of the day for each activity, it will really help you stay on track and drastically decrease your chances of falling too behind or forgetting to get something done by the deadline. Planning ahead like this increases the likelihood of you staying on top of your goals and is the key to success. It will also help you become more aware of the kinds of things you do regularly so that you can make adjustments to your daily routines if you notice some aspect of your schedule is just not working out for you. For example, if you notice that you are struggling to keep up with your schedule, this may mean that there is too much on your plate. Consider decreasing your workload and commitments so that you have more time for fun and relaxation. Also, try out different ways of organizing your schedule. Some possible options include Apple or Google calendar, setting up alerts and reminders with alarms going off at specific times on your phone and calendar, a physical planner with enough room under each day to list time frames for all of your activities and assignments, keeping a journal and using an entire page for each day to list your plans or even drawing out your own weekly calendar of events, or a whiteboard which you can hang on your wall as a way to constantly be reminded of your daily schedule. See which way of organizing your plans, activities, and/or projects works best for you and stick to it.
- Play Time: Other people will probably tell you that you need to focus and concentrate more, but they don’t tell you how. Being busy is not the same as being effective. In order to be more effective, you need to be efficient at the tasks you do. By getting clear on your long-term and short-term goals, desires, and interests you will be able to be more decisive in the choices that you make. All you need to ask yourself is if whatever you are considering doing is in alignment with your values and interests and if it will get you closer to your goals. Being more speedy and decisive like this in turn is also the secret to attracting more money and success. We also tend to only schedule things for ourselves that we know we can do or have done before because it doesn’t bring us that feeling of uncertainty that most people dread. However, it’s good to get out of your comfort zone once in a while by trying out things you’ve never done before – kind of like trying it on for size – in order to unveil some of your untapped potential. You wont really know whether you have an innate gift or skill that you haven’t discovered yet until you try out new things so it’s good to include at least one new activity on your schedule to try out once in a while as well. When you are more efficient with your work and are aware of your interests, skills, or talents you will be able to leave room in your schedule for “play time”. It’s a misconception that only children should play. Adults need play time too. Make sure to write down some things you love doing in your schedule as well, rather than only writing down your schoolwork or errands down. This will give you something to look forward to and assist in having more positive associations with scheduling (and keeping up with these plans) on a consistent basis. When your spirits are high and you are in a happy mood, you will have more energy and motivation to dedicate to achieving your work, errands, and goals as well.
- The Right Balance: Observe your overall life in general and view the different aspects of your life to figure out if you have a healthy work-life balance. How is your work and finances going for you? Are you engaging in activities in which you can tap into your creativity or have other outlets for self-expression? If you are in school or planning on pursuing higher education, evaluate how that is working out for you. Also, rank your social life and if you are happy in your relationships with family, friends, and/or co-workers. Do you have enough fun and play time in your life or are you always working and/or studying and don’t engage in other things you enjoy doing? Evaluate your love life as well, including past and current partners. If you are single, ask yourself if this is a choice that you made or if you are seeking or wanting to be in a partnership. This will give you a more objective perspective of the overall quality of your life and will give you a good indication of which aspect of your life you should commit more time and energy to improving. For example, if you have a large social network and community that supports you, caring friends who are there for you, and attend many social events, but are not satisfied with the fact that you don’t have money to afford the things you want, it will most likely benefit you to get a job and earn income to improve the financial aspect of your life. If time becomes an issue, you can most likely afford to dedicate less time to attending all of your friend’s social gatherings in favor of increasing your overall happiness by working towards attaining some personal savings for yourself through a job or any other means.
- Eliminating Procrastination: When and where you choose to work on essential projects or anything else you are working on can have a profound impact on the quality of your work and your ability to concentrate and work more efficiently. Even things as simple as lighting and surroundings of your environment can make a huge difference. To use myself as an example, I realized that I study best on a desk in a quiet corner with yellow and dim lighting, and it doesn’t matter whether it is in a coffee shop, in a library, or in my room as long as I’m not surrounded by loud and rowdy people. Some people, however, prefer to study in a social crowd even if it is loud because it actually helps to keep them awake. Once you learn about the locations that are the most favorable for you to successfully get work done, figure out what time(s) of day and/or days of the week you tend to study better or get more work done. Is it in the morning, afternoon/daytime, evening, or late nights? For instance, I personally discovered that my internal biological “clock” or rhythms actually fluctuate according to my mood, the weather, and the season. During springtime, summer, and fall, I’m usually exhausted throughout the day and the warmth of the sun relaxes me so I sleep throughout most of the day and actually work on my assignments during nighttime when I’m much more alert and where I can have the dim yellow lighting I prefer over the brightness of the sun/daylight. When I try to switch it up to have a more “normal” sleep cycle, as people often tell me, it doesn’t work out well for me and yields negative results like taking way more time on assignments than I normally would and being in a terrible mood which also makes me want to socially withdraw, impacting my social life negatively as well. During wintertime, nights get colder which makes me just want to cuddle up under my blankets so I sleep better at night, therefore, I change my routine to doing my work throughout the day and it works out well for me. So you may need to pay close attention to your body, what it’s asking for, and under what conditions it functions best in. I can guarantee that if you haven’t done this and you have issues with procrastinating, it will solve most of your procrastination issues or at least decrease the levels of it once you do. But if you still find yourself procrastinating too much, I have a few other solutions depending on what the underlying problems behind your procrastination tendencies might be. First, if you don’t enjoy what you are learning about or doing at work, this is a huge red flag that you are probably not on the right path in terms of your long-term career goals so consider other career options and switching your major. Second, you may need to make some necessary changes in your life that may be holding you back from progressing towards your goals. This includes things like: decreasing your social media usage, stop watching TV altogether, setting notifications on your laptop and synching it with your calendar while turning off notifications that cause unnecessary distractions, eliminating the toxic friendships and relationships in your life in favor of more communication with co-workers or classmates to help you stay on top of things, and seeing a doctor to see if there may be a medical reason behind it like inability to focus, anxiety, or depression. The last potential remedy to procrastination issues that I want to mention is that if you find it hard to get or stay motivated, try changing your thought patterns, attitudes, and perspectives about whatever it is you need to be doing. One way you can do this by visualizing the end result of having the task done and how great you will be feeling afterwards. You can also list all the positive things that you DO like about this project or whatever it is you need to work on and all the reasons you do want to do it and reminding yourself why you are choosing to include it in your schedule – rather than the “have to” mentality or constantly thinking about everything you don’t like about it and therefore assigning negative associations with the task that may not even have anything to do with the actual task at hand, but rather something else entirely. For instance, I may be telling myself that I really don’t want to attend this class lecture today because I’m tired, it’s going to waste more of my time, I don’t like it when the teacher randomly calls my name to answer a question I don’t know the answer to, that it is going to be boring, or because I didn’t finish the assignment that was due today. But if I think about the positive things that I do like about the class, I may realize that I actually learn a lot in this class, the professor lectures so well that I don’t actually get bored, and I can ask classmates about the parts of my assignment that I didn’t understand as well as have the opportunity to communicate with the professor about potentially getting an extra day to work on the assignment. As you can see, when I focus on the positives, I realize that they pretty much disprove my previous thoughts about all of the negatives I was fixating on. You can also look for more information or anything else about the activity that will get you inspired about it because when you act upon feelings of inspiration, you will have a more positive experience of the thing you are about to do.
- Constructive Habits: We’re all human so we need to have good self-care habits in order to be able to perform at our highest potential. If you don’t do this already, I suggest to take breaks between assignments/projects, one activity to another, or setting a timer to take a quick break every couple of hours or so for any other work or errands so that you don’t burn yourself out. Taking a quick nap during the day can also make a huge difference in decreasing your level of fatigue so you will have more energy to continue on with your day. Showing compassion to yourself by rewarding yourself for a job well done, after say, you completed all of your plans for the day is one way you can do this. For example, treat yourself by visiting your favorite ice cream shop or go to that fun event you really want to go to with your friends. When you are feeling overwhelmed or stressed, make sure to get some rest first and get yourself in a better mood before continuing on with your tasks for the day because the quality of everything you make or do will be much better when you are in a better mood. For instance, you can watch some funny videos or do that hobby you love for a little while to get yourself in a more positive mind frame. I know that personally, I used to want to avoid doing this because I felt guilty about not doing my most important tasks first, and thought it would just take more of my time away from doing those things, but actually the opposite is true because you can complete everything at a much quicker speed and process information better which will take much less time overall than if you were to not allow yourself to chill, have some fun, take it easy, and make sure you are feeling well. Another problem that many people struggle with is that they have a resistance to responsibility without even realizing it. Problems with time management, in part, has to do with feeling powerless to some aspect of your life and like you have little or no control over the circumstance(s) in your life. Taking responsibility puts you in a position of authority in your own life, empowers you, and allows you to take control of your life. And when you feel in control of your life, you aren’t likely to experience a scenario where you can’t keep up with your day to day plans and activities because you “don’t have enough time”. The underlying reasons why you might have this resistance or aversion to taking responsibility are most often due to negative past experiences which you associated with taking responsibility on a highly subconscious level. To list some examples: You may make it mean (or link it with) unfavorable outcomes such as being blamed if things don’t pan out well when you are in charge, experiencing a lack of confidence if you were to make mistakes or fail, having to compete which may lead to conflict or lack of closeness, having had to to take on pressure for other people’s benefit rather than your own in the past which didn’t get you what you wanted, having been taken advantage of or used by others (i.e. slackers) who try to piggy back on your hard work, while making you feel under-appreciated. The last tip in terms of forming beneficial habits that I want to mention is developing good self-care habits – as in taking care of yourself on an emotional and mental level (i.e. through meditation) as well as your body by getting proper nutrition and/or exercise and meeting all of your needs. Doing these things will most definitely improve your ability at performing at optimum speed so that time management will not become a problem.
- Other Tools & Resources: Utilizing videos which you can find on Youtube including affirmations, subliminals, and binaural beats work very well to raise your personal vibration. You can look for ones specifically for getting in the flow, focus and concentration, time management, and productivity to name some examples. Believe it or not, even things as simple as writing in color and color-coding different sections of your notes, highlighting essential information and only re-reading highlighted content to save time, using sticky notes and putting them on your wall near your desk area for reminders, listening to audios of readings, and connecting with other classmates or teammates on material you are working on, as well as sharing or exchanging notes are all things that can potentially save you a lot of time. I also recommend to buy a mini yearly planner because writing down your tasks, meetings, and assignments helps your brain’s memory processes in ways that typing them up does not. CVS, Walgreens, and Office Depot have some really awesome planners with each week divided and plenty of room for each day of the week as well as To-Do and Notes sections all contained within the planner. Even if you think you are doing a great job, it’s still good to receive feedback and support anyway. Getting a coach or mentor that will work with you one-on-one to help develop your goals and leadership skills as well as help work out any problems you may be facing will also provide you with more support which will make you feel more capable of handling and tackling your workload.
