Learning to manage our time better is one of the keys to personal and professional success. Although it may seem simple, it is not so simple: we are often overloaded with work, commitments and activities and, if we do not organize ourselves properly, this can lead to stress.
In order to find enough motivation to better organize our time, we can reflect on a series of aspects:
Time is money
Imagine that there was a bank that deposited 86,400 euros every morning but did not allow you to leave a balance of that money from one day to the next. Whatever you have not spent during the day, the bank withdraws it in the evening. How would you act?
Surely, spending every penny. But the reality is that each of us has that bank: it’s called time.
Every morning, we are credited with 86,400 seconds and every night, we lose the time not spent or poorly invested. Every day, it is a new account; every night, the remainder is burned. If we do not use the day’s deposits, we lose it and there is no turning back. It is important, therefore, to invest every last second to the maximum in health, happiness and success.
We are the ones who give value to time
– If you want to find the value of a year, just talk to a student who passed.
– If you want to realize the value of a month, talk to a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.
– If you want to value a week, discuss it with the editor of a weekly magazine.
– If you want to understand the value of an hour, ask two lovers waiting to meet.
– If you want to realize the value of a minute, talk to someone who just missed a plane.
– If you want to realize the value of a second, try to understand the person who just avoided an accident.
– And if you want to understand the value of a thousandth of a second, ask the winner of the silver medal at the Olympic Games.
Every moment counts if you know how to value it. Organizing ourselves can avoid the unpleasant feeling of not being masters of our own time. Here are some tips we can follow:
1. Plan: what activities should we do?
2. Prioritize what is important: Within these activities, which ones are priority and which ones are secondary?
3. Avoid interruptions: Once a schedule has been established, we should avoid anything that might make it difficult to carry it out. Focus on scheduled items: Stick to our schedule.
4. Know how to delegate: There are responsibilities that can be shared and we have the right to seek help.
5. Learning to say No: For some people, refusing others is very difficult, but sometimes, we have the right to think about our own goals.
6. Know how to use the phone, Whatsapp and email: They are the main sources of distraction that derive us from our tasks. Increasingly, the need to be always communicating is very present and causes us dependence.
7. Set limits to meetings: Establishing an approximate time we need to talk about certain issues can help us to be more concise and waste less time.
8. Schedule the necessary time and know how to limit the tasks we have to carry out: Spending too much time on one activity can also make us more unproductive and waste valuable time. We all need to disconnect from time to time.
In general, using the agenda and setting very clear objectives will help us to manage and make the most of our time and, above all, to keep some of it for ourselves and be able to enjoy it.