One of the biggest sources of stress that clients ask me about is time management. Time management experts have been sharing their ideas for years. Their suggestions have included the following:

            Prioritize your to-do list.

            Start with deadline-drive action items.

            Use a calendar system.

            Schedule each hour of the day.  

            Pomodoro method – work in 25-minute chunks, with 5-minute breaks.

            Break large projects down into manageable chunks.

            Make a daily “power list” of no more than three to five items.

Why, then do so many people have trouble managing their time? Well, you have to find the system that works well for you and then personalize it.

The biggest challenge is figuring out how much time each item will take so you can plan your items around your workday, be it eight hours or more or less.

I was recently introduced to a system that makes so much sense to me. It is called the Time Management Matrix that was conceived of by President Dwight Eisenhower.

The matrix can be found here: https://weekplan.net/academy/weekly-planning/4-quadrants-of-time-management

All the details and explanations are available at the link.

The reason this works for me is because I have more than five items on my running list of to-do’s each week.

This week I labeled each item from one of the four blocks in the quadrant & used hashtags.

For example, #UI (Urgent & important), #NUI (Non-urgent, Important), etc.

That helped me so much to figure out what had to be done each day.

From there I could number the items in any way that made sense, such as important client work, other deadlines, practice presentation, write blog post, make follow-up calls, etc. The impact was that it took the pressure off of feeling like I had to get everything done in one day.

Another thing I added was to combine bigger projects to my sheet of tasks. That way I can keep my bigger goals top of mind.

I hope these ideas are helpful to you.

Write to me and let me know what time management tricks work for you.