How One Simple Program Gave Me Three Ways To Improve My Time Management find out how I was able to do twice as much in half the time.20 Jan
A common new year resolution is to be more productive. Better time management at home, work to give us more “time off”. One terrific way I found to sharpen up the time management (giving me more time to play) was to start writing down everything I did all day… that did improve my focus on what was important but made it difficult to analyze any data… or, in other words, it was near impossible to flip pages back and forth to do any kind of comparisons to how I was focusing on certain items and when.
Well, I just recently purchased a simple little program called Minco. It is for Mac but I am certain there are many other programs out there for PC the do the same thing. Minco allows me to simply click a button which begins to record my time. I give the time recording a name (of the task) I am working on and Minco automatically adds it to my calendar. Now I can see weeks and months at a time, on one page. I can look back really easily to see what common tasks I do each day, how much time I spend on them and what time of the day I am do them. Now I have the ability to do three things:
First, I can limit the time I spend on simple daily tasks at home like, doing laundry, personal hygiene and walking the dog. Other items such as working out, reading the newspaper or your favorite TV show can also take more time then necessary. By combining some of these activities I was able to find significant time savers… for example, I can do my stretching routine while getting ready for work in the morning. Or getting my cardio workout by walking the dogs or watching my favorite TV show.
Second, I was able to put some higher priority items in the time slots that I seem to have more energy or time. With better focus and concentration on more difficult tasks I am better able to complete those tasks quicker. The quality and quantity of work coming from those higher energy time slots improved significantly.
Third, I was able to pin point where valuable time was being wasted between high priority tasks. Instead of thinking that I “needed to celebrate” after completing a difficult task (thus ending up wasting time in my high energy time slots) I use the “celebration” to begin another task. Go ahead, start another difficult task… even if you don’t finish the task, later, you will feel good about getting started or feel momentum to get it finished. After all, isn’t getting started one of the hardest things to do?
Well, these three little tweaks in my daily work flow helped me tremendously, and it all really is a result of using Minco. The most important part is I was looking at my to do list more often, evaluating and prioritizing though out the day. Some things I thought to be important fell by the wayside while other truly important tasks kept climbing to the top of the list quickly.
Obviously, this is not the final say in how to manage time, but is a nice little tip to focus more on getting things done and less wondering, “where did all my time go”.
