Today we are talking about how to make time for everything you want to do. So I’ll share some time management tips and productivity tips to help you do more. When I say do more, I mean to do more of what you want to do, not more busy work or more distractions.
Mindfulness and consciousness are the keys:
The first tip, is you have to train your brain to be more mindful and conscious. The key is you have to be really good at being aware and intentional about how you spend your time. Most of our time is given away when we are not focused and distracted.
I mean, you get an email, then you check it, and then you’re like, oh my god I have to answer this email. And then it leads you down a rabbit hole of doing something that you weren’t really intending to do. This is how most of us do not spend time in the most effective way possible.
Mindfulness is your power. You want to be able to choose, how you spend your time, you want to be the one that’s deciding okay this is important, this is effective, I’m going to do this first. Versus like being pulled in all directions. So how do we train our brain to be stronger and more conscious? So first you have to set some easy rules and boundaries for yourself, to not let yourself go down those rabbit holes.
For example, no phone in the morning, don’t check your Instagram, don’t check your text messages, don’t check anything that has the possibility of making you respond and waste time. So put your phone away in the morning and do something else. Do something where you feel connected to yourself. For example, meditating, meditate for 10 to 15 minutes a day.
Whatever you can do, meditation is a powerful practice to help you connect with yourself and calm your brain. When you calm your brain you can be more aware of things and you can be more intentional about things. Essentially, it trains your brain to slow down, and once you can slow down and be calmer and detached. You can be more intentional and aware. Because you’re not like feeling like, oh my god I have to like answer this right away or I have to check this right away.
The second tip is simple, cut out distractions and put your phone on airplane mode. If you’re working put limits on your social media apps. So that you only give yourself a certain amount of time a day. Just cut it out, and set those boundaries and limits.
Assess your time on a daily basis:
My next tip is an exercise that you can do on your any or this week. So you have to assess, how you’re spending your time, right now, daily, and weekly, for an entire week. Track how you’re actually spending your days by the hour. So you can do this in any calendar app.
You don’t have to track every single hour, what I mean is, you’re working on a specific time, and you put input that in your calendar. After that you took a lunch break and then you were on social media, for an hour, then you would go and put that in your calendar.
So try to be as honest as possible and track realistically how you’ve been spending your time throughout the week. You’ll find the time when you were distracted or maybe you were doing something that wasn’t really important. You had other important things to be doing but instead, you were wasting your time on something else.
With this exercise, you’ll learn two things. Number one is how long it actually takes you to complete tasks and with that knowledge, you’ll be better able to plan realistically your schedule. And number two is you’ll realize how much time you actually have in your day. Because I mentioned you’re gonna find those pockets of time where you have that spare time. You’ve been wasting it away. So knowing these two things can help you be more realistic about how much time you have. You will be able to plan everything else that you want to fit into your schedule.
Plan out a realistic timeline for all goals:
My next tip for you is to plan out a realistic timeline for all of your goals. This one is more about long-term goals and planning out long-term timelines. So most of the time, all these things that we want to do, it’s all in our heads. The problem is, that we either get overwhelmed because there are so many things we don’t even know. Where to start or we try to do multiple things at once and then we get spread too thin like, it’s not possible to make progress. Because you’re doing too many things at once.
So plan out the realistic timelines for how long it might take to work on this goal and which goals you should do first. So to tackle this problem you first have to list out all of your goals, like all of your long-term goals. Then look at everything you wrote and decide. Which one is most important to me or which one goal would make the biggest impact on my life.
There are certain things that will have a bigger impact than others. Those are that become your highest priority. So after you figure out which goals are more important to you. Try to ask yourself how long this goal will take. Is this a one-month goal, a one-year goal, or a ten-year goal? What kind of goal is this? So try to map out the timelines of each goal.
The goal here is to end up with a realistic timeline of all the things that you want to do. How long they’re going to take which ones you’re going to tackle first and why is it because they’re most important or most approachable. So you have a realistic timeline and vision for how you’re going to make it happen. Beyond that, all you have to do is then further break down those goals into smaller and smaller bite-sized pieces. I’ve shared this advice in a previous productivity post.
Honor your cycles and not push yourself too hard:
The next tip I want to share with you is to honor your cycles. So we all go through cycles in life. Sometimes we feel very productive, sometimes we feel like we have a lot of energy and hustle and then other times we feel lazy or slow. We want to be more gentle with ourselves.
So it is okay to have these cycles and these different phases of life. In fact, it’s normal and everyone goes through them. So I just want to remind you to honor your cycles and not push yourself too hard. If you feel like you’re not doing enough. There will be times, when you’re in the mood to be productive and when you’re not in the mood to be productive. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you and the point of life is not to be productive all the time.
It’s not about being efficient. We are not machines right. Humans are nature. If you’re a woman you have your menstrual cycles and there are certain parts in that cycle where we have more energy and then less energy. So there are cycles and phases and life is supposed to be a balance between everything.
Just a reminder on – Make Time for Everything You Want:
My last piece of advice is a reminder that if you are passionate about something and you would love to do that. You have to make time for that just like you make time for Netflix or movie shows. If something is important to you or if that thing lights your fire of passion inside. You have to make time for it.
If I’m not giving myself time to learn languages even though I really want to. Ask yourself why am I not doing that? So your answer would be, that maybe you’re not super passionate about it which is why you’re not making the time for it, or maybe your desire to do that thing is just intellectual.
So you just have to be honest with yourself. An example from my life is I always have so much to do on my plate. I am pretty busy. I have a lot of things on my to-do list and I can feel very overwhelmed very often but for some reason. I always make time to learn about random topics that I’m interested in. For example astrology, there was a point in my life when I was reading a lot of astrology books. I was watching astrology videos like it doesn’t have to do with my job but I made the time to do it because of a passion.
Somehow I make time for it so sometimes it’s not about using these tips and tricks. Do all those things that you want to do.
I hope this post was helpful. Let me know in the comment, which tip was your favorite or if you have any additional time management tips or techniques that you’d like to share.
Related: How To Increase Productivity While Working From Home