When it comes to time blindness, it is important to get crafty. Creating your own personal strategy for connecting your perception of time to the reality on the clock is incredibly important to your journey to becoming a more timely person.
Why should you want to be on-time? On-time in this case means not only being aware of what time it is but also what urgent tasks you have coming up and how much time it will take you to complete those tasks.
Building your awareness of time does not mean you will never be late again. Being more aware of time allows you to responsibly reschedule or inform people in the eventuality that you are running late by accurately estimate the time you have for what needs to be done and creating a daily-plan conducive to success.
Here are the 3 most powerful tools in the time management tool box. These 3 components will take you through the questions of - What? - When? - How? - take a look!
What do you start with?
Prioritization is key to time management. There are only so many hours in a day and they can easily be lost thinking and worrying about all the things you have to do. Prioritization is an act of defining and affirming intent. When you assign a task as urgent, meaning it needs to happen asap, and important, then other less important but urgent tasks should leave your focus.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple yet incredibly effective way of going through your to-dos and prioritizing. Go task by task down your list and categorize them with the visual below.
Check out this EZ download routine that includes a similar method to the Eisenhower Matrix!
When are you going to do it?
Setting focuses for larger blocks of time is a perfect way to provide yourself a guiding light during those periods without necessarily constraining yourself. Take a look at your main tasks or activities in any given work day, estimate how long you would like to spend on each and block those times for them.
For example, the first hour of your work day could be purely for emails. The second and third hour could be for scheduling meetings and taking them, so on and so forth.
How are you are going to get it done?
Now you know what you are working on and when you should be focusing on it, great! Now we get to another difficult part of it, execution. The most effective technique that has been established for getting work done in a timely manner without experiencing burnout is the Pomodoro Method.
Pomodoro routines are evenly spaced and timed routines that allow for a series of 25-45 minute sessions of work split up with 5 minute break times. Brili offers a few options when it comes to Pomodoro routines, they vary in length and activation. Go check them out!
EZ Download - Active Pomodoro Work Set
EZ Download - Night Owl Pomodoro
Using these 3 techniques in the order they are listed here can be incredibly effective in planting yourself in a daily rhythm and general awareness of time. Combine them all and develop your own custom way of doing each that is fun and exciting for you!