8 Time Management Tips - How I Manage My Time

10 Time Management Tips - How I Manage My Time

In this article, I wanted to share with you the top 10 time management tips that I use. These are the tips that actually make a huge impact on things like how on top of things I feel, how much I'm able to get done, and how well I spend my time.

“Motivation comes after starting, not before. Action builds momentum”. This quote is from James Cleo, and it's completely changed how I approach my days. A patent that's really easy for anyone to fall into is waiting for motivation to hit you. You wake up. You wait for the motivation to come to start cleaning your room and getting ready. You have a goal of buying a house, but you're just waiting for the day that you feel like starting to save for it. So there are a few ways that this knowledge has changed my life.

Go Slow, But Don't Stop

Firstly, I use the go slow, but don't stop rule. So if I'm feeling wildly demotivated instead of just throwing all my self-care tasks out the window, I tell myself to go slow, don't stop. Cooking a simple tofu stir-fry might take two episodes of The Witcher instead of the usual 30 minutes. My usual tidy routine could take 45 minutes, not 15.

But as soon as I start, I feel this motivation to keep ongoing. And I just tell myself, just go slow, don't stop. Just starting creates almost this open loop in my mind that I feel the need to close despite a lack of motivation.

Just Do It For 10 Minutes

Secondly, I tell myself to just do it for 10 minutes. If I don't feel like writing, editing, creating I say to myself, it's okay, just do it for 10 minutes. See how you feel. You can totally stop after that. Just do it for 10. So I set a timer, and I do it for 10. 

By telling yourself, I'm just going to do it for 10 minutes, I'm just going to go for 20 minutes, you're gonna open the loop far enough that you'll feel the urge to close it. The ultimate thing to do when you are demotivated is to apply just do it for 10 minutes and slow but don't stop. 

Make Your Time Visible

So this is a really quick change that you can make during your days. During work sessions, I make a point to use my time timer and to make my time visible. There's something about being able to see out of the corner of my eye that time is actually passing that motivates me to get my work done. Time pressure is something that I am in two minds about.

So if I'm doing administrative, more clinical kinds of tasks that don't require any creative thinking time pressure are it. If I'm doing a creative kind of task, I try to take the time pressure off. I probably wouldn't use a time timer.

You can make your time more visible with a Pomodoro app. There are plenty on the desktop. There are plenty of extensions in Google Chrome. There are apps that you can get so you can set up your phone, and you have a visible timer there. You can get an hourglass, or you can get a time timer from a place like Amazon.

Create Templates For Repetitive Tasks

Often getting things done is much less about willpower and much more about your environment. Successful people create smart working environments that avoid resistance. One way to create less resistance is to set up templates and checklists for activities that you do regularly. And this is a really good way of shaping your environment that is accessible to most people. Some examples of templates that I used to make tasks easier are things like my morning routine, checklist, my weekly reset checklist.

Work With Your Dips And Your Peaks

Something that you try to do while you are in your dip might take four times as long verse when you try to do it at your peak. So if you're an early riser, you have a day job. You're working on your side hustle in the afternoon, the task that you're doing is probably taking you two to four times as long because you're not working with your energy peak, which would be the early morning before work. Working with all your mind. Your body works like swimming with the current you get where you want to go a lot quicker, wasting a lot less energy.

Power Hour

So a long while ago, I took a course, and it was all about launching, and they talked about how every single day you should have power hour where you do a bunch of launch activities and you cram everything into that power hour. I took that concept, and I ran with it and I created something that started out as an admin hour. It's a future me hour, but this is an hour focused on doing usually administrative tasks.

Future me hour is dedicated to the piece of future me, by doing a bunch of things within an hour that make future me feel a lot less stressed. A good chunk of future me hour is just engaging with the things that I need to engage with.

In the book Get Everything Done by Mark Forster, he talks about how attention management is everything. And anything that doesn't get regular attention simply gets worse. House, plants, cars, projects just about anything. The reason that most projects and goals fail is that they just aren't given regular attention. So in the future me hour, I try to make sure that I'm giving attention to the things that need attention to keep on moving forward.

Daily Shutdown

At the end of a working day, which will be either when I finished all of my tasks, or when it hits about 4 pm, I do a tidy and I plan my next day. And this is something that I did when I was in an office environment. And I do it now that I work from home.

By doing this, I create this clean slate for the day ahead. So I wake up. Things are tidy. I have a plan for my day, and it really makes a fresh start feel like a fresh start. I will say, with my tidying habits sometimes when it gets the arvo and I'm just like, oh, I feel so tired. I will put it off to the next day, but that's okay because in the morning, I'll just do my tidy anyways and they'll still give me that fresh start feeling.

And by planning my day, I also wake up with this clear idea of exactly what I'm going to fill my day with. It's so much easier to get started. There is no decision fatigue involved. 

Time blocking and Prioritizing

So to organize my days, I'm writing down a list of three things. These usually come from weekly to-do’s. I start with my most important to-do. And then I have two nice to-do’s. One thing that I find helpful is really having the mindset of my most important to-do is the only thing that I need to get done in my days.

Sometimes you get all of your things done and more, but some days that simply doesn't happen. So make it a point to prioritize the most important to-do. After that, I create a little daily time block. I put in any meetings, any gym workouts I booked in for. And then I put in my tasks.

Today, I talk about things that you can do pretty instantly that will simplify your life, make things a little bit easier, which is what I am all about. I appreciate you guys so much, and I will see you soon.