How To Better Your Time Management
Oh, time. What a love-hate relationship I have with you. You stress me out, make me sprout gray hair and gave me my first aging spot right smack-dab in the middle of my chest. Thanks a lot.
All jokes (that aren't really jokes) aside, time is a really cool, twisted thing. When you're trying to run a business while also working a full time job, it may definitely seem like the devil in disguise. Learning to work with time is going to be your saving grace in growing this business, my friend.
You need to learn exactly how your mind works so that you can schedule accordingly.
I'm a procrastinator. A lazy one, at that. I put things off until the last minute and when the last minute hits, I still may not do said things. Sue me.
The day I admitted that to myself and discovered how to work around this trait was the day that time became less of a stress and more of a tool. Time is not your enemy. Time is a tool that is helping you get form point A (your 9 to 5) to point B (that rockstar life).
When you can discover how your brain works and what processes allow you to be more productive, time management will become a breeze.
You need to know when to push yourself or schedule yourself some time so that you can do just that! Unfortunately when you are working a day job and your passion job, you can definitely be stretched for time. This is where discovering your time management traits really come in to play.
Obviously there is no way around your day job, you need to work to raise money to grow this passion you're working on! So you've got a solid chunk of your day that you need to focus your attention solely on that - no biggie!
But what you do when you are no longer at the 9 to 5, is completely in your hands. I'm going to share with you some tools that really helped me on my journey towards the leap.
My favorite time management tools.
A planner.
I have a love-hate relationship with planners and could probably write an entire post on this topic alone. I'll spare you the fluffy details and just tell you that I started to go through planners like I went through socks. I would start using one, get bored, then put it in a drawer. Next thing you know, I've got a drawer filled with quarter way filled up planners and a head filled with way too many thoughts to juggle.
I finally found a couple that worked for me. Katie Daisy's planner and the Passion Planner turned out to be the ones that worked best for me.
The Passion Planner is great because it literally is based around planning your passion...the title even says it! This planner takes you day-by-day, hour-by-hour - which I really enjoy! It helps to see your day fully in front of you and then plan accordingly. It also has little activities for you to complete each week and month.
Katie Daisy's planner has beautiful artwork, which is what originally drew me to it. It doesn't take you hourly like the Passion Planner, but it does give you a solid chunk of space for each day. This was nice when I didn't need to focus so much on the hourly basis. I would just write down a general to-do list based off of what I needed to accomplish for that given day and then tick them off as I went along.
Moral of the story - invest in a planner. Get the chaos out of your head and on to a designated paper. You won't have an excuse as to why you forgot to do things anymore and it really does help clear some of the noise in your head.
My FitBit.
I got my FitBit originally for a very silly reason. It has a silent alarm. When I first got it, I was just getting into meditation and I wanted something that could act as a stopwatch and not have some crazy blaring noise at the end of the set time. Well, FitBit has a little vibrating stopwatch built in that I found extra handy during these times.
But then I started using it for block scheduling in a sense. I would set the time for 30 minutes, an hour, whatever and I would do whatever I needed to do for that set amount of time. It felt good to have a block of time designated to one particular task. Then a very gentle vibrate would bring me out of that blocked time.
Obviously I enjoy seeing how many steps I do during the day and how well I sleep, but those were not nearly as important to me as this dumb little vibrating stop watch on my wrist. I'm strange like that. Appreciate the little things, right?
Now, of course, I'm obsessed with my FitBit and check it constantly throughout the day. I've noticed it's been a great tool to have along the way of the journey that I'm on!
A journal.
Writing things out feels amazing. Having a journal didn't help immensely with time management per say, but it really helped me to clear some of the clutter that my mind was collecting so that I could focus more energy into improving this area of my life.
I'm grateful that I developed a journal practice and it really did help me out over time.
If you want to find out more of what I journal about, I do a quick breakthrough in my mindful morning routine post that you can find here.
If I could give you one piece of advice for handling time management, it is this:
Get that crap out of your head and on to paper.
However you want to do it, just do it. It will help you immensely in this struggle, I freaking promise!
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