We all would love to be achieving maximum success in our vocational endeavors while also having limitless time for our families, hobbies, and charitable pursuits. The truth, however, is that we all only get our precious 24 hours each day, and something will always give if we try to “have everything at once” – our health, happiness, or productivity take a hit when we cannot manage our lives with thoughtful balance.
Time Management for Business Success
When you are working toward excellence in business, you have to consider what actually moves the needle for your goals, versus what keeps you standing still. Having a great scheduling system is a good first step, but as you grow and become more flexible, you may find that you need to schedule time to not do things. What makes sense to spend your time on in your early career may need to be delegated when you achieve some success. Time management in business has everything to do with realizing what your own time is worth, how much of it you can afford to devote to work, and how you will prioritize among the tasks available to you. The earlier you can ask yourself these questions, the better, and you’ll need to re-evaluate as your position and responsibilities evolve as well.
Time Management for Fulfillment in Other Areas of Life
Time management goes far beyond the workplace; we need time management to be able to feed our families, keep our homes spic and span, and get some precious hours in on the tennis court or with that needlepoint project. Our workday tasks can become harder to do if we don’t feel like our work is earning us the freedom to do the things we love. By making your home life efficient and well-planned, you get the opportunity to focus fully on an activity and enjoy it fully; this is nearly a lost art these days! Children, for instance, may make it harder for us to stick to a particularly strict schedule, but no one is as good as a child at living in the moment and fully enjoying a ball game, ice cream cone, or outdoor adventure. Your schedule is strong if it is like a tree; it should be flexible even when things change and can grow around obstacles.
Managing Time By Saying No
Both work and play require a very important skill to create a successfully managed schedule: you have to be able to say no. At work, there are tasks that are undisputed in the fact that they belong to you, but there are also many activities on the fringes that could be done by someone else or done later. If offered additional tasks that do not benefit you or aren’t things you want to do, flex your “no” muscle and refuse politely. When you practice saying “no,” you’ll start to see the freedom to excel that comes with saying no to things you don’t need to do. This is especially true in our families; there are many options, which some people see as pressure to do everything. Instead, help your children learn time management by imposing limits on the activities that both you and they will participate in. This preserves free time for imaginative play for your children, and helps you remember that you deserve time to yourself, not just a packed schedule of zipping all over town.
5 Ways to Achieve Your Productivity and Fulfillment Goals
Reduce Social Media
Most of us use social media as a “meta-activity” – it takes time, but it doesn’t actually add to our fulfillment or productivity! Certainly, 5 minutes of sending and reading personal messages on your social media might be a great use of time, but an hour of idle scrolling and “liking” is unlikely to make you fulfilled. Cut as much of the idle social media as you can, even if it means quitting “cold turkey.”
Define Work Time and Leave Work at Work
Try to decide on a goal for how much you want to work each week, even if it may be somewhat outside your control. Whenever possible, in non-on-call jobs, try to leave the work in the office and completely switch gears when you get home. These conscious choices are a way to reduce how much workplace stresses and workplace tasks can interfere with your home happiness. If these boundaries aren’t here now, start to establish them over time through honest conversations with your supervisor and careful planning of your projects.
Practice Mindfulness In Your Favorite Activities
When your mind is racing during a hockey game or a week at the beach, try to keep from opening email or social media just to fill your mind. Try breathing exercises or visualizing what you want to be feeling in the moment; often, the urge to overload our brains passes and we get to go back to our activity. Try to live as fully in the moment as you can when you are outside of work; you’ll draw so much more joy from even the smallest things in life when you can manage to do this.
Plan Ahead to Find More Time
If you just never have the time in your day, take an honest accounting of how much you plan ahead and how much more you could. Would 30 minutes on a Sunday afternoon help you to get through the weekly schedule, food planning, and other prep that normally takes hours in the moment throughout the week? Try strategies for taking your time management to a new level, like using an online calendar for the whole family or batch-preparing meals.
Create Meaningful Boundaries and Structures
Above all, make time management your own: you know which parts of your days feel the most panicked and rushed, and which are doing just fine. Each month, try to identify a single problem spot, be it getting kids ready for school or getting home in traffic. Experiment with a schedule change that reduces the stress and creates space for happiness; you’ll slowly see your whole schedule revolutionize!
Do you want more help making your business highly successful while maintaining a strong work-life balance that emphasizes wellness? Contact us today to learn more about how we can be a part of your success!