“The most precious resource we all have is time,” as Steve Jobs said. Knowing what this incredible man did and yet listening to a quite inspirational speech from the 2005 Stanford Commencement, Steve Jobs delivered the wisdom that you have to find what you love and not waste it by living someone else’s life. Also, at the end of his life, he conveyed the most important message: ‘Treasure love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends. Treat yourself well and cherish others.’”
Steve Jobs reminds us that time is precious, and we should take care of it. In our fast-paced lives, managing our time well and looking after ourselves are crucial for success and happiness.
Hence, let’s just not talk about it—let’s live it so we can focus on what mattered the most. To manage your time better, we can learn from taking some approaches as below.
Time Management: Time is nonrefundable, and it’s essential to recognize the intrinsic value of time itself:
- Clarify Your Destination: First, decide what you want to achieve, just like planning a trip. What is your goal?
- Choose Your Path Wisely: Identify what’s most important and what kind of sacrifice you are willing to make to become the best version of yourself. Who do you want to become, what kind of person?
- Create a Schedule: Think of your day as a map. Make a list of what you need to do and allocate time for each task. I love creating fun to-do lists. Show your creative side, and you will be more engaged in actually completing the tasks.
- Battle Distractions: Distractions are like obstacles on your journey. Use tools like silencing your phone or finding a quiet space to stay on course.
- Embrace “No”: Remember, you can’t do it all. Saying NO sometimes is like setting boundaries to protect your time and HEALTH. Also, ‘NO’ is a complete sentence, and we’ll discuss it more in future blog posts
Setting Priorities: Deciphering what counts. Interesting fact is that you do not need more time, you just need to decide and realise the following :
- Difference Between Urgency and Importance. An extensively used prioritization tool is the Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix is a time management tool that helps prioritize tasks into four categories: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. There are also other methods like ABCD or 1-2-3 that you can use to figure out which tasks are most important and have the closest deadlines. These methods seem quite similar but work in slightly different ways, so find the one that works for you. Using the methods mentioned, you can begin with the truly most urgent tasks.
- Time Blocking: Set aside specific chunks of time in your daily schedule to focus on your most important tasks. This keeps distractions aside and ensures you have enough time for the things that matter the most.
- Discover the 80/20 Rule: Think of the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle, like this: In many cases, around 80% of the results come from just 20% of the work or actions. It’s a handy way to understand how a small part of what you do can have a big impact.
- Flexible Planning: Life changes, so it’s perfectly fine to adjust your priorities as you go.
Prioritizing Self-Care: Taking care of you. Do things that makes you feel more like you:
- Daily Self-Care Rituals: Similar to eating and sleeping, self-care can become a daily habit. It might involve exercise, relaxation, or pursuing your passions in creative way. We talked about in morning and evening routines.
- Prioritise sleeping (!) :This is such an important part of our life that the ‘hustle’ culture made us feel wrong about it. Remember sleep will provide us wit emotional well-being, cognitive function, productivity and longevity! Hence think twice before you cut off your hours of rest.
- Establish Personal Boundaries: Think of personal space as a protective bubble. Communicate when someone is getting too close. It’s acceptable to decline things that cause stress.
- Seek Support: You don’t have to tackle everything alone. Asking for assistance is akin to enlisting friends on your journey. Do not bother what other people are saying! You are perfectly capable and the only people who would point a finger at you while seeking for help are the unsecured one.
- Celebrate Every Achievement: Every accomplishment, big or small, is like discovering a hidden gem. Treat yourself with some books, coffee, t-shirt you love, tv-series, a course for your creative side, what ever you like. Point is to celebrate you! 🙂
- Continual Learning: Learning new things is akin to gaining experience points. It makes you more resilient and knowledgeable. It is proven that if you keep getting a little better every day for a year, you’ll end up 37 times better in the end! What about that. So please do not think our small improvement do not count, its the opposite. Every little step now, will worth so much in s long term.
As you develop these skills, you’ll find that managing your time becomes more effective, you gain a deeper understanding of what works best for you, and you’ll become more self-reliant, relying less on the opinions of others as you recognize your own capabilities.
P.S. I have made a checklist in my notes that shows what helps me get through my day. I hope it can help you too.
Disclaimer: Image credit to the marked pics gors to original creator on Pinterest . If you are the creator or know the source, please contact me for proper attribution. All other photos are done by me. Thank you! ☺️
Tanja's diary 🧚🏻♂️ 