time management Archives - Bridge Between

What is your ideal week? If you’re like most people, it would have something to do with a beach, a book and a drink with a tiny umbrella.

That’s not what we’re talking about.

What is your ideal work week? According to Michael Hyatt at www.michaelhyatt.com an ideal week is the week he would live if he could control 100% of what happens. He claims that you can either live on-purpose, according to a plan you’ve set. Or you can live by accident, reacting to the demands of others.

Mike Anderson (www.mikeyanderson.com) agrees with the discipline of creating an ideal week. He compares it to city zoning:

In any city they want to make sure they have a good mix of commercial, light industrial, high density residential and low density residential. City planners section off the city into zoning areas so that as people want to develop property, they can—but they keep the desired balance. An ideal week should zone off your time so that your calendar can get filled in organically, but still make sure that your life has the right balance of priorities.

Marie Poulin uses the ideal week model consistently for her business and life. By structuring her time, Marie has seen her work thrive naturally simply because she wastes much less time. She also recommends tracking your time. One way is the program Rescue Time found at www.rescuetime.com. Once installed into your computer, it runs in the background and tracks where your time is being spent, even how much time you waste on Facebook.

So how do you create an ideal work week?

List all your essential tasks. Put them on paper so you can look at them face to face. Ask yourself what is most important. Number them by priority. By doing this you are getting your brain to make sure that you find time for the tasks that are most important.
List your goals. Put them on paper, too, so you can see them before you and make a decision to have your ideal week reflect your intentions. Thomas Edison had a goal to create a major invention every six months and a minor invention every ten days. He did not invent on accident. He was an intentional inventor.
List the routines you have. Exercise, shopping for groceries or writing might be a few examples. Do you make time each day to comment on social media sites? Write that down and put a time limit on it.
Having all of this information on paper prepares you for creating your ideal week. Find a calendar or a template that will fit your schedule. Michael Hyatt has a great one he offers at http://michaelhyatt.com/ideal-week.html
Identify themes for each day. This can help immensely in grouping certain activities today so your brain doesn’t have to switch gears so often. For example, Marie Poulin wrote identified the themes of each of her days:Sunday: Rest and plan for weekMonday: MentorshipTuesday: Creation
Wednesday: Mentorship

Thursday: Mastermind

Friday: New business development and content creation

Saturday: Personal day

Now, using your themes, label your days or sections of your days.
You are ready to take your lists and schedule your important activities. Use a specific color to help identify them.
Fill in the less-important activities. Shade them a different color.
Tweak your ideal week. It usually takes a few tries before you have it how you want.
Don’t be legalistic. Remember it is a calendar. You are in charge of your life, not it.
Share it with your team. This is a vital step in having an ideal week. If your team knows your schedule, they can help you stay on track with your business’s goals and even your personal ones. Encourage your team members to make an ideal week too, and share it with you.

In the Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg shares how making an appointment with yourself significantly increases the likelihood that you will do what you intend to do. Vicki Davis writes When you create your ideal week, you are visualizing what it looks like. As you make choices of what you will and won’t do, you’re aligning your week with your goals.

If you take the time to create your ideal work week schedule, those ideal weeks at the beach with a book in one hand and a little drink in the other will be even better, knowing all you have accomplished.

Sources:

http://www.coolcatteacher.com/time-management-tips/

http://mariepoulin.com/blog/design-your-ideal-week-increase-productivity/

http://michaelhyatt.com/ideal-week.html

http://mikeyanderson.com/planning-your-ideal-week

www.rescuetime.com

Time. We all wish we had more of it. Yet no matter how hard we try to conserve it, it seems to slip away from us in drips and drabs.

This is especially concerning if you’re in charge of a team of people responsible for ensuring your business runs smoothly and efficiently. If you can help every team member become more effective, think how much time you’ll save overall! Here are five time management secrets to teach today.

Shorten Those To-Do Lists

One of the biggest time sucks is the endless to-do list. Filled with small and often nonessential items, to-do lists are only useful if they serve the purpose of helping people be more productive. Teach team members easy way to shorten to-do lists, like getting rid of all items they’ll do no matter what. Think “check email” or “get lunch.” Scratch easy tasks that don’t need to happen right away; they often become tempting due to their simplicity, and end up taking precedence over harder but more crucial chores.

Belle Cooper recommends moving tasks that depend on other people somewhere else (to a follow-up list, for instance, or a shared project) so that you don’t have to feel the nagging pressure of tasks you can’t complete on your own. Teach your employees how to distinguish between tasks they can and should do right away, and those that should be filed somewhere else or ditched altogether.

Take Time to Be Creative

Creativity is crucial. It makes people feel happier, more productive and more in charge of their own work lives. It’s an amazing way to give your workers a little freedom, boosting their brainpower and making them more efficient when they return to regular tasks. Of course, creativity must still fall within the scope of the job, but giving workers time to explore, read, create or invent can immeasurably improve attitude, moral and time effectiveness.

Create a System for Email

Ah, email. To reduce mental space and inbox space wasted by email, teach employees to deal with it right away. “Inbox Zero” should always be the goal, so read, reply or file instantly to reduce inbox clutter and improve efficiency.

Handle a Task Once, and Once Only

The “One-Touch Rule” can significantly limit the amount of time employees spend waffling between tasks and feeling mentally burdened by chores that seem to haunt them forever. We all know that feeling of picking up and putting a task down so many times that it becomes a huge monkey on our backs.

Instead, teach employees to process each task as soon as it reaches them. If it’s an email: read, reply or file. If it’s a piece of paperwork, they should complete it, photocopy it or file it away. Whatever the task, when it comes across an employee’s desk, they should know how to handle it immediately.

Note that some tasks can’t be done at that moment, in which case processing it means filing it in the right place for later, then putting a date on the calendar for when it will be dealt with and how. Some tasks are also large, in which case processing can mean breaking the task into steps and waiting until there’s enough time to complete them. Whatever the case, ignoring the task is the No. 1 time-wasting no-no, so offer better alternatives.

Have an End-Of-Day Routine

At the end of the day, teach each employee to create a short to-do list for the next, containing only the highest priority tasks, and unclutter their work space so it will be fresh and ready for the following day.

Time management doesn’t need to feel impossible when you institute these tips in every worker’s daily routine!

Tag: time management

Creating Your Ideal Week

So how do you create an ideal work week?

5 Time Management Secrets to Teach Your Employees