Written by: Michele Lee Occhipinti, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
How do you currently handle your time? Do you jump from project to project and due date to due date or create a strategy for your success to make it happen?
To best understand the importance of time management, take the opportunity to consider what life is like without it. When you have a goal to achieve are you just taking it day by day, spending a majority of your time to keep your head above water with all the things you know need to be done with a task or checklist, then you are likely managing your time poorly. When you are consumed with just getting the tasks done, you end up missing the greater opportunities such as the larger goal, often regretting the time consumed on one task asking yourself what did I just spend most of my time on and was it necessary?
Learning to properly manage your time will help you remain on top of all your projects and overall goals, as well as achieving the success you see in long- and short-term goals. Using your time efficiently. Working with some of the top leaders in the world and effectively managing their time I understand how essential it is to overall success.
Accomplish the Right Goals for you with Time Management
Now that it is Spring you may be looking back at your goals and feeling you have achieved very little not getting where you want to be, feeling less fulfilled allowing other priorities that came along to occupy your time rather than achieving the things you truly desired, if this is you, then it’s time to consider taking a new look at your productivity and the way you think about the importance of time management and what is most important to you.
The secret to effective time management is much deeper than just a list of tasks and projects hoping someday your success will just happen. It’s a way of transforming not only how you spend your time so you can consistently and efficiently use the time you have to create what truly matters the most to you. Your biggest accomplishment!
Mastering the management of your time means giving yourself the ability to accomplish the goals and dreams you envisioned. Are you often telling yourself you don’t have enough time and “need more time,” but that’s not really the case. Rather, take the time to clarify your personal and professional goals with the right strategy for you and make better decisions for efficient time management for you to assure it happens.
Effective time management is connected to highly developed self-control and crucial life skills such as setting goals, future planning, evaluating your time and how it is spent, analyzing your progress and prioritizing goals and achievements. Remember your ambitions are possible, but only when you have the right strategy and plan that outlines the results towards your greatest success.
Take back the Power of Managing your Time
The power of managing your time is with practice and commitment. Treat time as if it was just like money. Like money, it doesn’t grow on trees nor does it last forever without being properly managed. It needs to be spent efficiently in accordance with the goals and dreams that are valued the most. If you spend your time effectively, you’ll achieve the things you’ve envisioned. This will bring you ultimate fulfillment, when you are achieving outcomes, but you’re also fulfilled with your life and your role within it. In leadership managing time wisely for you and your team to achieve your vision towards the business’ mission’s success efficiently is essential to be successful.
Focus on Productivity the Right Way
An important key to understanding time management is focus. Focus on your productivity, is it being done the right way?
You have all control of your decisions. What you focus on is what your energy will lean towards.
To clarify the power of focus in perspective, consider the movement with the achievement. Involving you to move forward. What sets achievement from movement is the fulfillment that comes with knowing that you’re moving toward the outcomes that really are important to you, rather than simply slowly walking forward for the sake of moving. Its motivating you with a target to head toward and outline criteria for success that will help move forward toward the feeling of achievement that you desire.
Utilize your Time for your Benefit
Once you decide on what you want to accomplish, have a means of measuring your success and have the internal drive to make your vision a reality, get serious about time management.
People ask me often as a coach. What if there are many things you want to achieve? What if your most highly valued outcomes require meeting other goals first? Sometimes we have too much to do between our personal and professional lives and other times the one thing we must do has many moving parts that we often get frustrated and avoid working toward it altogether lacking motivation. This is where you really learn the importance of time management.
Take a moment to review all the areas you need to achieve the outcome. You can organize your outcomes according to areas that relate to your specific situation, those that relate to your finances and those that have to do with your relationships at home or at work. Focus on these outcomes instead of things you want to do, you’ll be able to distribute your time more efficiently. You’ll also know you’re moving toward the things that you truly want to achieve, which will motivate you to work harder.
Another way to make time management efficient for you is by utilizing any open time by using the time that might be wasted on areas towards your greater goal. For instance, if you usually listen to music during your commute, put on a podcast that is geared toward the goal you have in sight. Listen to an audio book on your peloton or tread. Work towards a project with your earbuds on while you’re sitting in a waiting room. Get out for a walk and listen. Its all within your reach.
When you achieve clarity and focus, you’ll find the time you need to make your dreams a reality because you’ll be propelled by motivation and passion that you weren’t even aware of before.
Remember, it’s not about the number of hours you have, it is about using the hours to your greatest advantage to maximize value.
Everyone Needs to be Free of Time
Often we look at free time as something lost, the wasted hours we could have spent getting ahead and not falling behind. That’s not the case. As you develop an understanding of the importance of time management, you’ll realize that free time is a precious asset you need to utilize.
Realize time that is actively spent in pursuit of your goals produces value. Suppose you are spending a weekend with your family and loved ones on the beach off a beautiful island, giving each other your undivided attention. Now let go of your cell phone during this time and be present just enjoying the moment. What do you notice?
What is the value to you in that situation? Are you building on an important area in your life that provides fulfillment? Take the opportunity to be present in the areas of life that are most important to you. Resist the urge to look at your phone and see what you are missing out on, this is important. One of the greatest areas in our lives Is the love and connection that is needed by us all. Without it you are likely left unfulfilled.
Time management means there is a time and a place for personal and professional needs. There will be days you will leave work aside and focus on you. Some days will come when you need a breather and take it easier on these days, and that’s all right. Don’t be afraid of using time for things other than work and your self-improvement. What really matters is being clear in what is important to you and, if that’s your relationship with your family or your health, volunteering to help others, let each of those outcomes be the ones that you allot time toward first.
Better Overall Health with Time Management
Stress and time are connected. When you effectively manage your time, you feel more organized and in touch with your goals. Stress levels are lower, and you continue to decrease your stress, improving your health.
When you are unclear on what your goals are, there is a lack of passion within you. You may begin to dread what you are working on, eventually putting it off until the last minute, sometimes missing deadlines all together, creating more stress, which often manifests emotionally before it does to you physically. First, with frustration, then sadness, possibly even feeling useless or without purpose. Energy will begin to lack, and you may experience headaches, pain and possibly depression. The stress that comes with poor time management can be damaging to your health and well-being, but with the right time management strategy it can help you shift to be your best self toward the quality of life you deserve.
Just like running a marathon. When you make the right decision and invest in yourself, you begin to increase the passion and internal energy within you. Once you incorporate time management skills into it you will take back control, fueled by the excitement and the feeling knowing you are headed in the right direction for you.
Skills to Improve Efficiency in Time Management
An established time management strategy can help you organize your work. Your leadership. Your life. Your home. It is allinter changeable within your personal and professional life. Not every time management strategy is effective for every person, there are many different strategies to use to build your success. Take a moment to try out these tips to build the nexttime management strategy for you.
1. Connect Goals To Daily Work Outcomes.
Time management is not always about getting all your work done but rather, it is identifying and prioritizing your most important work. In order to do that effectively you need to prioritize the goals from the vision and connect daily activities to complete on your own or communicate to others to determine the most important tasks to tackle daily.
The best way to coordinate work and priorities across all levels of your organization and life is with the best strategy. With the strategy, you can connect daily work outcomes and team projects to company objectives, communicating effectively to team members allowing them to fully understand how their work impacts the company’s mission. Which is an essential piece for every leader in today’s working world.
For individuals, using time management efficiently by connecting the goal towards the daily outcomes by determining the actions you need to take that day and making it happen. Not allowing other priorities to take precedence.
2. Prioritize And Organize Your Work.
It is critical to know which tasks are important. Inevitably, you’ll have a task that shifts in priority or a deadline that gets moved up or down. This is life. Being resilient through the changes is crucial to your success. If you don’t have clarity on which work is more important, you won’t be able to adapt and prioritize the right work. Understand your priorities and list them accordingly. I always like to tell my clients to review their priorities weekly as they can change on an ongoing basis.
It is important to prioritize your work so as not to overload yourself on areas that don’t require your time. Mitigating any burnout. You might be familiar with burnout, which impacts a growing number of individuals every year. This has become more prevalent in the remote working world. According to recent research individual workers feeling burnout cited feeling overworked from a lack of clarity on the tasks and roles as a contributing factor. Unclear on which tasks to prioritize. By understanding what is essential it helps to increase confidence that you are working towards the right tasks each day providing motivation for you to succeed.
3. Plan At The End Of Each Week.
The work week can often feel like a continuous wave. One minute you’re on top riding like a surfer and the next it brings along a crash with more cleanup that requires your attention. If you’re the type of person who goes through emails every morning trying to figure out how to prioritize the day, you’re not alone, that’s not the essential way to be productive of your time and there’s a much better way in prioritizing your daily requirements. Working in the corporate world to coaching the world’s best we can easily become distracted with our inboxes allowing it to take up a large chunk of our time that we can later feel unproductive in. Same goes for using time unproductively on social media. Pay attention to the areas that are unproductive to you. Be sure to use your time wisely!
When dealing with emails and messages, I often recommend to my clients to determine two times a day a time to review, respond and prioritize accordingly. If something is emergent or on your radar requiring immediate action prioritize accordingly. As a leader communicate effectively how communication is to be provided what constitutes a text, what can be communicated via email and what needs to be brought to your attention in a meeting. There are additional ways to create efficiency in the program of choice in the email systems you use.
Instead of reacting to an email first thing in the morning or at 4:30pm in the afternoon, you can make sure to incorporate that important work into each day’s schedule so as not to overload your work week and prioritize your workload for you.
4. Hold Boundaries Or Delegate.
The advantage of prioritizing your time is it allows you to gain clarity on what is important and requires your time to what is less important and does not require your time. When a function does not align with your experience or duties it can be let go or delegated to one that holds the qualities. Consider a team member that would appreciate the opportunity to complete the task and you trust. Remember delegating doesn’t mean the task is not important, it means the work isn’t in line with your current priorities or experience. It could be that this work is more relevant for someone else’s expertise. Assuring you are ensuring the work is done by the best person for the job.
Like saying “no” to work, take some time to look through tasks you committed to a while back and are still working on. Is there anything that’s currently on your plate that no longer aligns with your goals or requires your time?
When you find these tasks, ask yourself if this work needs to be done at all. If it’s no longer important, consider putting the work on hold. If the task still needs to be done, ask yourself if you’re the best person for the job, decide on a deadline and if not you, go through the same delegation exercise to figure who is best on the team.
5. Determine A System For You.
When you set the deadlines. Determine actions. Review the outcomes. If you’re still tracking your work by hand, it’s time to upgrade. As satisfying as it can be to take notes manually, written to do lists are disorganized, prone to miss important actions, easy to lose, and are basically ineffective. Get the most out of your time.
When you take ownership of your time management it improves your ability to make better decisions prioritizing what is essential and the actions needed. You learn to take your time and make calm, meaningful decisions rather than reactive panic driven, last-second choices.
Consider when you reach the goals that are most important to you efficiently what it will look like to you. Is your biggest goal within reach in the next 6 months or year? If you continue to wait and not follow through how you will feel in a year a from now knowing you did not take the time to prioritize with the right strategy. Begin with the strategy, this is best for you. Where will you be when you make it happen.
By taking control of the art of time management, you will learn what you need to transform your career, relationships, increasing your life fulfillment and health, turning your goals into reality for you to be your best self.
Are you ready to take the next step to reach the ultimate productivity in time management for you and the team you lead?
Contact me at Ack Professional to determine what you need to achieve your next level of success.
Be the best version of you!
Michele Lee Occhipinti, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Founder of Ack Professional, Michele Lee Occhipinti is a world class peak performance leadership & life strategist, on a mission to empower individuals to preserve their integrity, raise their performance to become the best version of themselves. Michele brings decades of experience alongside executives, some at the most prestigious of Fortune 500 companies. As one of the worlds top 1% worldwide.Following her integrity, from a place that inspired her, Nantucket, passionate to empower and transform the lives and leadership to maximize full potential for ultimate success in today’s world.
