Time Management Activities

These time management activities are the ones that our clients say have been most useful for them.

Here we provide a those activities that can make a big impact on your use of time.

Activity 1 identifies your current time usage and areas that you can improve your time management.

Activity 2 identifies how much time you are spending on your time priorities.

Activity 3 gets you to plan your top priorities in a weekly planner - which harnesses the power of the 80/20 rule and results in big increases in your effectiveness.

Time Management Activity 1: Assess how you spend your time

When you want to save for something, what do you usually do? You are likely to draw up a budget of the things that you spend your money and places where you can trim that expenditure to save for the thing that you want.

Well the same principle applies to time. A first step to better identify how to use your time better involves analyzing how you spend your time now. To do this, download the time management log, and for the next 5 days keep a track on your time. Note down the time you start your activities, what you are doing, and the time that you finish.

Download your free time-management-log and start today.

Time management Activity 2 - How much time is spend on your top priorities?

Put a star next to your top priority items - those tasks which were most important to you. Perhaps it was spending time with your family, working on that proposal, or the quite time you spent by yourself.

Once you have put a star next to your highest priority items, identify add up how much time you spend per day on these most important activities.

For the next week, try to spend more time focusing on the activities that have most value for you.

By focusing more on the activities that are important to you and less on the low priority stuff, this time management activity can help you to live more effectively.

Time management Activity 3 – Plan your work and work your plan

List all the activities that you have to do over the next week. Now put an A, B or C next to them. The A’s being your most important activities, and C being your least important activities.

Looking at all of your top priority items, now put them into a weekly calendar and schedule a time for them.

Look at the things that you have done (in activity 1) if you need help in determining how long different tasks took you. Block these most important times out in your diary – this doesn’t mean you can’t change them – but at least you have a plan and a direction for the next week – which can always be adjusted.

Another tip - Try to identify periods of time in which you are likely to be full of energy for your high priority items – there is no use in being half asleep on your most important job. For me, I am a morning person, so I try to schedule my most important activities in the morning – before 11am.

What this activity does is it harnesses the 80/20 rule, ensuring that you do you spend your high energy time on the most important activities. The 80/20 rule comes from an Italian economist, Pareto, who observed that 80% of results come from 20% of our activities, and conversely that 20% of our results come from 80% of our activities. So to maximize your results, this tasks ensures that you execute your top priority tasks first.

Do you have a great time management activity? Please share it!