Take Control of your Time, Achieve Your Goals

Welcome to Part 2 of this series on Time Management. Over the years, I've developed a set of tools that I personally use and have coached others to use to help put us back in the driver’s seat of managing our time. In this post, we'll take action following our findings from step one, understanding where the time goes.

Now that we've completed our time audit, let's dig in to see what we can learn from the data.

When is your best time of day?

As you look at the entries for the past week, do you see patterns to your overall energy levels? What time of day do you feel most energized? When does the energy lag? This is where early birds and night owls might notice big differences. Early birds often find their peak energy in the morning, while night owls tend to feel most energized later in the day. Whatever time of day has your peak energy, make note of it as this will become the cornerstone of your daily planning and the prime time for accomplishing your great work of the day.

On a daily basis, we’ll leverage this time for important work that requires our best focus. This time is too precious to allow meetings and administrivia to creep in. Proactively guard and protect it by blocking off recurring appointments with yourself on your calendar. Decline, reschedule or renegotiate meetings that fall into this window. During this focus time, work on your primary objective for the day, and where possible, turn off notifications so that you can apply your full focus to getting important things done.

If you implement only one thing from your time audit findings, you will reap huge rewards in productivity and feelings of accomplishment from this one change.

In Part 3, we'll learn how to prioritize tasks and maximize your productivity with the Four D's method paired with an Eisenhower matrix. We'll Do what matters, Defer what can wait, Delegate what others can do, and Delete what's no longer relevant.