At the start of the year in One Business, we looked at goal setting and time management. I created a Business Goals Action Plan Tool that involves dividing our year-long goals into quarters and months.
Starting the year off looking at business goals is reflective of my recent obsession with managing my time. With my increasing commitments, my time during the week is even more scarce and precious. And while I do have moments of OMFG! what on earth am I doing, I am just bloody doing it.
I’m not sure this is a universal truth, but I have been recently thinking:
If you don’t manage time, you will never have enough of it.
I see other people who do not manage time who have way fewer daily commitments than me really struggle to get what they want done. (And are stressed about it)
This is why I’ve begun to think about the importance of managing time.
What I am doing?
For the last 12 months or so I’ve decided to take the ‘how do you eat an elephant? one bite at a time’ to heart.
I rarely have the luxury of a full day to work on any given activity. In an ideal world, I would have full days to read, write and think. But that just doesn’t happen. I don’t think it ever did.
So what I’m doing instead is breaking-up jobs into bite-sized chunks. I then give myself short windows to get them done. I’m amazed at how much I can get done in 2-hour blocks.
But what I do is make sure I turn off all the notifications. I let everyone know I’m not online and add the block to my calendar as focus time.
What I am not doing?
Unfortunately what I have failed to do is reduce the number of activities I have committed to. Between the growing business, working at QUT, and the growing number of community obligations, I am letting it get out of control.
But I don’t think this is a time-management issue as must as a can’t-say-no issue. I’ll keep working on that one.
But in the meantime, breaking up the job, then chunking & blocking time really is working.