#340 time tips

It is Finals Week where I work, and with it comes a cadre of stressed out students.  I am seeing bleary-eyed students in the hall after pulling an all-nighter and taking an exam, and I am seeing students staring aimlessly at the same page for an hour.  In this spirit, I declare this Time Management Week and will provide a series of tips that have worked well for me in managing my time throughout the decades.

Tip #1:  Understand Your Use of Time
There are 168 hours in the week.  Pull out a piece of paper and try to account for where you spend them.  If you're like most, you don't have answers for more hours than you expected.

It's a pain to do -- I'll say that right up front -- but I still advocate for keeping a time diary for one week.  Where does your time go?  It's hard to answer that question without some understanding of the answer.  Keep track of the hours you spend on computer games or television; the amount of time it takes for you to get ready in the morning; the time for household chores.  Where are there periods of wasted time (and intentional recreation is not wasted time!); where are there gaps that add up of time that just slips away (do you really wait in line at the coffee shop two hours/week??).  Your task is to figure out what is before you can make any changes.

Tip #2:  Acknowledge Your Energy Level
While we all have peaks and valleys given specific circumstances, on the whole I believe that people have a certain rhythm that works best for them.  Time management task #2 is to figure out when that time is for you and then capitalize on it.  I wrote about this in Blog #118 (September 27, 2012) so won't repeat it here.

We all need to do things when we would prefer not to, but you may be surprised at how much control you have over when you get the tasks accomplished.  Pay attention to your energy levels and see if you can match your task to your corresponding level of pep.  Or another way to look at it: try to be like an environmentally-friendly light bulb and produce the same brightness with less wattage!

More tomorrow!

-- beth triplett
leadershipdots.blogspot.com
@leadershipdots
leadershipdots@gmail.com