Do you often end your day wondering where it went? Do you have a long list of dream projects you want to get to someday? If you’re like many professionals, you often feel as though you spend most of your time putting out fires and not enough making real progress. What’s particularly insidious is that you’re so busy trying to cope that you don’t even have time to put a better system in place. Ironically, adopting a new time management system takes that very thing you don’t have enough of. However, if you’re ever going to get off the treadmill, you are going to have to stop, breathe and take stock of your situation.
Streamline Your Processes
Take a good look at how you do things. Are you as efficient as you can be? In particular, explore the possibility that many things can now be done online, up to and including some types of medical appointments. For example, if you need a medical marijuana card, you can speak with a doctor today and get the process in motion. You may need to wait a few days or weeks to get your card, but this is one of many ways busy professionals can save time. Are there meetings you don’t really need to be a part of? Can you delegate or outsource some of the tasks you ordinarily do? In particular, try to identify what are often referred to as low value activities that you can get rid of. Be ruthless as you consider what could be discarded or changed.
Identify Your Priorities
At the start and end of every day, identify your priorities. A morning routine that builds in time to think about the main things you want to accomplish combined with an evening routine that reviews the day and what went right can significantly boost your productivity. It shifts you away from being in a reactive mode and makes you more proactive.
Work in Blocks of Time
The popular Pomodoro technique for working in short, energetic bursts may sound like old news, but that’s largely because it works for so many people. The trick is not to necessarily stay beholden to its specific time blocks but to use its principles to work for you. Maybe that’s a five-minute break for every 45 minutes of work with some longer 20-minute breaks built in, or maybe it’s 10 minutes every hour. You can best determine what schedule will make you most efficient.
Avoid Burnout
We’ve just told you how to do everything faster, so being told to slow down might seem counterintuitive. However, as much as the world seems to reward the mindset of being on 24/7, the fact is that you simply cannot continue to work efficiently without periods of downtime. In fact, building in that time means that you will be able to complete necessary tasks much more quickly. You may not be able to stick to a 9 to 5 workday or take every weekend off, but be sure to build in a little time each day in which you have nothing scheduled, and be sure to take some days off.
