Making new and healthier lifestyle changes such as improving your diet or starting fitness classes can help protect you from serious health issues such as obesity, diabetes or heart problems. Changes like healthy eating and frequent physical activity will also increase your energy and confidence. If you can stick to these changes, they will become part of your routine. But how do we make these changes when we seem to have very little spare time?
Peter Drucker talks about it in The Effective Executive. You need to differentiate between being effective and being busy. Most people are very busy but not effective.
Most people do a tonne of non effective tasks simply to fill up their day so they feel like they are getting things done.
There is no greater waste of time than to do tasks efficiently that simply do not matter or should never have been done in the first place.
Effective people don’t actually look that busy though they get a lot more done.
You must track your time
You must manage your time
You must consolidate your time
Most people get clear on what they want, then they plan their time sequentially. Instead he says this is the wrong place to start.
Instead start with this;
Tracking your time
For 3-4 days track everything that you are doing and where you are spending your time. This will automatically give you a boost in productivity, what we track we get more competent at straight away, just like tracking your steps all of a sudden we start walking more.
By tracking your time, now you stop scrolling social media as much.
We do this to see where we are spending our time on a daily basis, you might think you are doing a lot of sales calls or spending a lot of time emailing when the reality is you might not be after you start tracking.
Now we have tracked our time we can go to step 2.
You must manage your time
Time is the only thing you can’t get back, once it is gone, it is gone, it is the most valuable asset so you need to use wisely.
There are definitely things you are doing on a daily and weekly basis that you shouldn’t be doing. Just like if you are trying to achieve a body transformation there is food that is definitely easier to stay away from to easily lose body fat.
For me I need to keep chocolate, pancakes with nutella and ice cream hidden or out of the house because I simply eat to much of it, the same goes with your time.
What do you need to get rid of that is simply taking you away from your goals or making it slower for you to achieve them.
Sometimes it’s not about adding more things in, it’s taking certain things out that increases our performance.
You need to be willing to say no to the non essential tasks to get you moving forward.
Lastly, now we can move to point 3.
You must consolidate your time
Having half days where you completely focus on moving tasks forward. Or 2 weeks undistracted going all in on focusing on the number 1 thing.
How much better would your day be if you spent 3 x 30 minute blocks over the course of the day. You have zero distractions but creating time for reading a book, listening to podcasts, meditation and fitness classes.
Having these time blocks where you aren’t going from task to task lets you hone in on getting creative and productive on the 1 thing that really matters.
Social media gets shut down, you only have open what needs to be open over the deep work time block.
So what do you want to push forward in your life over the next month? If you spent 18 hours of deep work time on that this month, could you create a mind blowing plan?
What does your day look like?
- Wake up & first thing you do is listen or watch something inspiring, motivational & positive
- An eating system that makes it super simple to follow
- Reading a book at lunchtime
- Taking part in fitness classes or going to the gym
- Meditation music to put you to sleep
Remember when you do this over 1 month, it is done forever.
You focused deep work, you created time blocks to move your life forward and to have more knowledge.
Then next month you can focus on improving your life, health and taking part in fitness classes.
The problem is every single month we are trying to optimise everything that we end up optimising nothing.
Follow these 3 steps to get on top of your time management.
Once you have your time management in place, contact us to join our fitness classes and become the healthiest version of you possible.
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