Who would have thought?
After spending years and years working, there is one lesson me and the remainder of the world has not learnt. What is it? Time management. Every single Sunday night before I go to work, I think, ok, this week I'm going to do this, this, this and this. Does it happen? Of course not! We end up getting to work, doing our thing and by the time we're done, the tiredness has crept/swamped/baffled us and we leave it to another day. Unfortunately, this is the world we currently live in and the only way out is to start introducing 34 hour days. I'm sure if we're nice enough the one above will keenly oblige and bless us with an extra 10 hours. Or we can take another option and do some serious time management work. Oh yes, and still be good of course!
So Tip 1: Try and get some rest on a Sunday night before work. Rushing into the beginning of the week can have a serious impact on the remainder of the week. I call it the domino effect. Why? Because we go to bed at 12am, wake up at 6.30-7am or for the less fortunate, earlier and we're already rushing. We miss out on doing several things that carry on to the next day and so on until Friday comes along and oops, I haven't done half the things I'm meant to.
Tip 2: Try and plan out your day with realistic goals. Instead of thinking you can go for a 5km run and get yourself ready for work in a 1 hour period, set yourself something achievable. In other words, get ready without going for the run and eat less, or, yes, I'm going to say it, park your car a fair distance from work and walk. If you happen to catch public transport, walk a fair distance instead and catch it from somewhere else. My philosophy has always been, walk walk walk. If it takes me 30 minutes to get home by public transport, and then go for a run for another 30 minutes, why not walk home for an hour. Ok, this is not rational when you catch a bullet train to work or have to use a free way (in some countries walking on a freeway is perfectly normal. I said normal, not safe) but I'm trying to help about 50% of the worldâs population in this paragraph.
Tip 3: Start your work earlier! I am being a total hypocrite when I say this but oh well. I'm only trying to give advice that works! I'm sure that right now, at least one of you is sitting down, reading this article and thinking, okay okay, Iâll start after I'm done reading this. Of course, that's when you decide to go and warm up last nightâs left overs. That situation where we are sitting down, doing our work last minute at 3.00am in the morning and then we think, this is never going to happen again. Who are we kidding, it keeps on going. Until you break that cycle, it will happen again and again.
Tip 4: How many of you sit down on your desk, filled up with piles of paper, open up your bag to a number of folders and scrunched up papers. Or, the final one, store files on your computer with duplicate file names on your USB or any other portable storage you have. Then you want to get access to them but realise you forgot them at home, or on your USB. Yes, again, many of us. Well, get organized or organi's'ed as us Aussies prefer to spell it. I've been using an online program myPDV to store some of my work and I can have remote access to it as well. But for those who want to pretend you did your part of the work but a) 'forgot it at home', b)'I forgot it at my friends house last night', yes, I know you have a friend, c) I got so drunk on the weekend and lost my USB that had the work on it, then this program is not for you. Please only use it if you want to get organized. For all those who would like the sinful way out (can you feel the guilt yet?) Then don't bother using it.
To finish off what I'm saying, it's not hard to time manage and get organized. Well, who am I kidding, it's easier said than done and I'm sitting here on a Saturday afternoon still in bed thinking what I should get to eat. Although, it is Saturday and I've happily finished all my work. So, if you want to significantly improve your time management skills, the tips above will get you half way there. Doing them is the other half!