Some of the methods that were discussed in the last article for organizing and optimizing your social life can also be applied to organizing your time. For instance, scheduling essential tasks and things you want to do as though they were social commitments is an excellent way to organize your time.
Recognize Your Limits
The first point to consider when organizing your time is that you must consider your own limitations. This is where a lot of us fall into problems because we often forget that our energy is finite as well as our time. If you find that you’re currently not doing the things that you would like to be doing, again, you need to prioritize.
A perfect example of this is when we come up with plans to lose weight that inherently involves working out for an additional three hours on top of our regular training routines while also dieting.
This results in you having less energy when you’re expected to start exerting yourself for an extra three hours, along with traveling back and forth from the gym.
Because of your finite amount of energy, this scenario just won’t work, leading you to fail at your goal. Like with your social relationships, it is vital for you to prioritize your time.
Make Time to Recover
When you have a finite amount of energy, it is crucial that you give yourself time to recover. When we can recharge our batteries and recover from our day, we are more productive overall. When we continue to go, doing one thing after another, we will eventually tire and stop working correctly.
To keep your productivity up, you need to find a way to divide your time between resting and working. This will help prevent you from getting into situations where you are only half working. Half working is the worst thing you can do for your life because it means that you aren’t really getting much done, but you’re not relaxing either.
Half relaxing is just as bad. This is what happens when you’re too tired to do anything useful, but you feel like you can’t justify relaxing, so you end up just sitting on the couch zoning out. This results in you not getting anything done as well as failing to enjoy your time off.
This is why it is so crucial for you to allow yourself the time to recover and make full use of it. You can even schedule it, so you have something to look forward to while you’re working, while at the same time ensuring that you’ll actually take the time to rest and relax.
Timing Your Tasks
As you are deciding when you’re going to schedule those crucial tasks and when you’re going to plan for rest, it’s helpful to consider the natural ebbs and flows of your energy.
There are natural times during the day when you’re more productive and times of the day where you crash. Most of us, for instance, will find we hit a wall right after getting home from work and are less productive at work after 3 pm. Likewise, it can take us a little while to get started in the morning.
You also need to take into account the activities that you participate in throughout the day that impact your energy level. One of the simplest ways to make yourself exhausted and want to crash is to eat dinner because your body needs to digest the meal you’ve just eaten, which leaves you with little energy to do anything else. If you want to keep your energy levels up, don’t sit down on the couch, and don’t eat a big meal until after you’ve completed your most important tasks.
Multitasking
As we’ve already discussed earlier, multitasking can be a destructive force on your mental clarity and productivity when you’re at work. However, in the right circumstances, multitasking can be highly useful in your personal life. Multitasking doesn’t usually work when you’re trying to complete work tasks, but in your private life, it can be helpful in any situation where one of the tasks you’re trying to achieve doesn’t require your full attention.
An example would be when you need to go shopping; you can call a friend. Since you don’t need to have your full attention on the task at hand, which would be buying food, you can catch up on your correspondences during this time. There are plenty of household chores that you can multitask with to help you get more done, so you can have more time to relax. Multitasking at home can help you accomplish twice as much in half the time.
Closing Open Loops
One way to help you feel more on top of your life is to close all the smaller tasks that you may consider ‘open loops.’ While it makes sense to work on the biggest and hardest work tasks first, so you can ensure maximum productivity. When you’re at home, you should aim to do the reverse.
When you’re at home, your tasks are generally less pressing, so it makes sense to tick off the smaller tasks that you have to do so you have less stress and fewer things weighing on your mind.
We tend to put off small tasks like paying bills, calling friends, or RSVP’ing to an event because we find them stressful and don’t want to use up our energy thinking about them. However, this just ends up causing us to unconsciously worry about them, resulting in us having less energy and time available to do anything else.
When you have tasks that can be completed quickly that are weighing on your mind, just tell yourself that it’s better to get it out of the way now since it will have to be done eventually.
To help you get your time better organized, give yourself thirty minutes after you get home from work to close off these small tasks, or ‘open loops’ so you have less on your unconscious ‘to-do’ list, leaving you more time and energy to focus on what’s important.
