Time Management Self Care Tips
Managing all your responsibilities takes time and you may be the last one on your to do list as you take care of everyone and everything else. How do you also find time to take care of yourself? Here are some Time Management Self Care Tips for tracking and analyzing your time to make more time for you.
If you juggle multiple responsibilities and feel torn apart trying to manage a job or business, care for a loved one, children, aging parents and a home then you know how challenging it can be trying to do it all. It can become overwhelming trying to juggle everything at once.
If you do it all but you’re still not as productive as you want to be, do you know how you really spend your time?
The question to ask is not how do I take care of everyone else and find time for myself. The question is how can I analyze my daily performance, improve my efficiency with time, strive to do better and focus on what’s most important?
These are strategies worth investing your time in. My guest on Time Management Radio is Sheila Marcelo, CEO of Care.com. Sheila has some great time management self care tips for finding time to care for yourself and everyone else while maintaining mental clarity, focus, peace of mind and living a purposeful, productive life. For an audio version of this post, click here
Listen to these Time Management Self Care Tips as we discuss:
• Simple ways to create the right mindset for success with your time.
• Time Management Self Care Tips and Strategies for setting priorities, improving your focus and time efficiency and reaching important goals.
• Time Management Self Care Tips for analyzing and tracking your time so you can improve your productivity and save time while you focus on taking care of yourself, your work, business and others.
Inspired by challenges caring for her own family while juggling multiple responsibilities, Sheila Marcelo founded care.com in 2006. Today the care management company is the largest online care destination in the world with 7 million members in more than 15 countries. Care.com allows families to connect with millions of caregivers to manage the lifecycle of care challenges families face: childcare, including special needs, senior care, pet care, housekeeping, tutoring and more. Sheila’s passion for technology was developed during her time as a management consultant at Monitor Company and as a teaching fellow at Harvard Business School.
Here’s the link to the recording
Time Management Self-Care Tips: How to Track your Time to Make More Time for You
If you have multiple responsibilities that take up your time and you’re not as productive as you want to be, then I suggest you take a look how you actually spend your time during your day. Are you focused on your goals and doing the activities that will help you reach your goals?
Do you spend the bulk of your time doing things that create value for you, your business or the company you work for? Or do you spend your time spinning your wheels, feeling like you’re going in a million different directions while you accomplish very little?
You may be wasting time on activities that are not value added. But you’ll never know that unless you analyze your performance and keep track of how you spend your time. This simple process will help you become more mindful about the activities you choose to do and which ones you should let go of. This approach will help you focus on what’s most important and will help you become more productive with your time.
More Time Management Self Care Tips and a 5-Step Activity to Help You Track and Analyze How You Spend your Time:
Set aside an hour where you can really keep track of your time. Get a timer and set it to 60 minutes. A simple egg timer or stopwatch will work. Do your activity within that hour. When the timer goes off, write down how you spent the last 60 minutes.
1. Write down every detail: What you did for the first 15 minutes, the next 15 minutes, and so on.
2. Write down what intention you set for yourself at the beginning of those 60 minutes and what goal you planned to complete within the hour.
3. What were you thinking about during that hour?
4. Record your feelings while that hour passed.
5. What did you accomplish within the hour? Did you meet your goal?
If you fell short of meeting your goal, what happened? Did you take a phone call? Did you get distracted by something or interrupted by someone? How much longer do you estimate it will take you to accomplish your goal?
If you accomplished exactly what you set out to do, congratulations! Did it take you the entire hour or did you finish early and move on to your next goal?
If you really keep track of your time during one hour of any activity, you’ll find you can save time and accomplish your goal.
As you begin to use this process, you’ll start to accomplish your goals early. You’ll gain as much as 5, 10 or even 15 minutes in an hour. If you meet your goal early, set the timer and go on to the next project to complete within 60 minutes. And then do it again. If you do this for 8 hours straight, notice how much time you gained.
Let’s say you gained 15 minutes out of every hour just by doing the short activity. That’s 120 minutes you gained within 8 hours. If you add that up over 5 days, that’s 10 hours of free time you just saved yourself! That’s an entire workday for some executives.
If you multiply 10 hours by 50 weeks (assuming you take 2 weeks vacation), that’s 500 hours or 21days per year you just gained!
Think about what you would do with 10 extra hours a week or 21 days of Free time in a year.
Would you get more sleep? Would you play? Exercise? Take a vacation? Read a book? Spend time with friends, care for your loved ones or take better care of yourself?
Realistically you’re going to be spending some of those 8 working hours having lunch, attending meetings, picking up the kids, doing errands, running to meet clients, etc. But I hope you get my point.
Even if it’s not 15 minutes out of every hour that you save, even if it’s only 5 minutes of every hour of the 8 hours you’re working, that’s 40 MINUTES OF TIME you’ve just freed up to do something you want or really need to do.
Time Management Self Care Tips: Where you can find an extra 5 minutes in an hour
• Do you spend some of your free time each day in idle conversation with colleagues?
• Do you spend time in meetings when you could easily conduct that time on a conference call or on Skype?
• If you’re the one conducting a meeting, are you setting a time limit for it?
• If you’re at your desk all day working on a project, are you really spending all of your time at it, or do you find yourself drifting off, surfing the web, checking social media accounts, reading the news or getting up frequently to refill your coffee cup or get a snack?
• Do you allow yourself to be interrupted by phone calls or colleagues who want to pass something by you?
• If you travel, how do you spend the time between meetings and flights?
• When you get home at night do you spend your time watching television? Are you too exhausted to do anything but go to bed?
• In the morning, do you spend a little extra time in bed instead of getting some exercise, which you know would be good for you and would increase your energy level?
You choose how you spend your time and what you do with it.
Each second, minute, or hour you let pass by without meaningful intention is time you could have spent doing more of what you want.
You either choose to spend time on the activities you want, or you don’t. You either achieve the results you want, with your Time or you don’t.
It’s all up to you.
If you like what you read here and you’re ready for some executive coaching, go to https://kathryn-mckinnon.com/executive-life-coaching and contact me at [email protected].
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