March 2016 Live Tweeting Calendar

This month we'll have more political debates as the parties whittle down their nominees, and NCAA Basketball takes the spotlight with March Madness!  Don't let a single opportunity for engagement slip by you in March!

12 Things To Incorporate Immediately for Better Time Management

I am often asked that magical question, "How do you have time for it all?"  I am of the mindset that we all have 24 hours in a day.  All of us.  Not a single one of us, whether we're a parent or a student or a worker or any combination of titles, has a single minute more.  If you want to do x, and you really want to do it, not just think about doing it, then you will make the time for it.  Here are some habits I've taken on, from advice columns and from my own experience, that make a difference in my life.  

Prioritize your time and be realistic

If you habitually overestimate how much time something is going to take, you're going to have good time management because you'll be able to plan your day based on that amount of time and giving yourself a little bit of wiggle room. But if you habitually underestimate how much time everything takes, you will never get everything done.  In fact you, will probably end up spending more time on the things that don't matter and not getting to the priority items.  You think that you can knock out a few small things first, but then they take longer than you expected them to, and you end your day feeling like you got nothing accomplished because you didn't actually get to the bigger things. There's a book called, "Swallow Your Frog," and I find the majority of the book very shallow, the basic idea is pretty brilliant: you spend most of your time avoiding doing that one thing that's really the most important thing to do, but if you get that out of the out of the way than everything else seems to fall into place.  Even if you only get that one thing done all day, you'll feel better about your day knowing that you knocked it out of the park. 

Set your future self up to succeed

Setting reminders for yourself is a great way to stay on track. Predict how your future self will act, and set yourself up for success, not failure. Putting off exercise until the end of the day and then doing a lot of exhausting work is not the best plan if you tend to want to go to sleep after doing all this exhausting work. They say variety is the spice of life, so in your daily activities, especially if you have a full day to plan, make sure you are varying the activities between physically active and more of the sit down-, brainstorming-type activities. 

Be accountable

Do the things that you owe to other people first, or the things that you have to do in order to move on. This way even if you don't finish everything on your to do list, the people that you care about won't be negatively impacted. And if a friend or someone close to you asks you to do something, and you have no intention of doing it, express that you really do not see it as a priority and do not expect to have excess time right away to do that task.  Only take on what you are really willing to do, and then do it.

Touch everything just once

What this means is don't read an email in its entirety, then decide that you don't want to deal with it right now, and then go back later only to reread it, still not do anything with it, re-read it again the next day, and maybe finally do something with it at that point in time. You wasted time reading it and rereading it. You should be able to tell by the subject line and by the sender if it is important enough that you need to act on it right away, and if its not, don't read it until you have time to fully address it. Once you have read something, commit to finishing what you need to do with that email.

Respect your time - nobody else will

If somebody is trying to keep you over in a meeting or in a conversation that you haven't allotted time for, politely cut it short and make sure that they know that you have obligations elsewhere. There are times to work on your relationship and spend the extra time, but if you have somewhere to be or something to do, then that is not the right time to work on your relationship and put in the time in there.  Learn to say no to meetings that you don't need to involve yourself in and that are not of value to you (unless your manager expects you to be there).  

Find the system that works for you

Organization is a big part of time management. You can't finish that home improvement project if you don't know where the right tools are. If you take a note on a post-it about something that you have to do, and then you spend 25 minutes looking for that post-it, you waste of time there as well. This is why for me everything digital makes the most sense, and the exact same reason why for other people printing everything and filing the information in organized folders makes sense for them. You need to figure out a system that works for you, and if it doesn't work, abandon it immediately and try something else. 

Remove Facebook and email from your home screen of your phone

This tip may come to a surprise coming from someone so ingrained in social media.  However, I do social media and email on my terms, and that is the big difference.  These things (email, facebook, Pinterest, Twitter) distract us from what we were going to look up, going to do, going to write down, or going to... whatever. Moving it away from your home screen means that you have to consciously decide that you are going to go and seek Facebook or email in order to check it, which means you have made the time to do so. Having it on your home screen, with the little counter telling you just how many notifications you have, nagging you to "check me, check me," just distracts you from what you were going to do, sucks your energy and wastes your time.

Keep a calendar of some sorts

Some people prefer digital, some people prefer visual, physical calendars. Whatever works for you but again it has to be your system and it has to work for you. Everything that's important from a date that you have to remember to register, to events that you're signed up for, to show that you want to watch or movies that are coming out, Presidential Debates, award shows, anything that you want to pay attention to goes on the calendar. Don't leave anything to memory. 

Get enough sleep

Study after study shows that getting enough sleep helps you be more productive throughout the day. If you are not at your best and you are not prepared to tackle all the challenges, you will feel disappointed and fall into a spiral of unproductive behaviors. On the contrast if you get enough sleep, then you will be productive throughout the day to the point of potentially exhausting yourself so that you can get enough sleep at night. The cycle works both ways. If you go to bed knowing all the things you didn't accomplish you will probably stay awake worried about those things. This unfortunately can be true even when you are a very productive individual. So my simple solution to this is to send an email to myself reminding me of the things that I need to do or the things that I had forgotten, so that way I don't have to worry about whether or not I will remember it in the morning. Then I can sleep restfully. 

Use your commute

I think the commute is the most over-looked time asset of which people aren't taking advantage. I use my morning commute (and specifically morning because I don't often want to do it when I'm done with work) to practice a new language. If you're not interested in learning a new language then use that time to listen to an audiobook. You can download TED talks to your phone and listen to them while you drive; most TED Talks don't require a whole lot of visual although you want to make sure that that's the case before setting yourself up to drive while listening to it.  I know a lot of people who say they sing in their car or use that time to relax and listen to music.  Music is fine, it's great!  I love music!  But there are other times you can listen to it (see below).  So think twice before dismissing my advice to be more productive in your commute - you may be missing out on a gold mine of time!

Manage up and ask for help

There's a lot of things that you can learn about managing up, but the key for me in terms of time management is that when I'm overwhelmed at work, I ask my manager to help me prioritize. This not only ensures that I'm working on the right things and the most important thing for my manager's perspective (which is really the only perspective that matters). It has the added benefit of showing her that I'm in trouble and that I need help, and could potentially offer ideas of how I can offload some of my work to other employees that aren't as full from a workload perspective. Additionally, it reminds the manager of all the important things you have going on, so if you don't urgently get back to her about a fifth-priority task, she will have a perspective as to why.  

Put down the remote, and crank up the tunes instead

Don't watch TV or YouTube until you're using it as an award for your productive accomplishments. TV and YouTube can be a big time suck, but not only that it can actually drain your energy, to the point where even if you turn the TV off you don't feel like getting up and doing those things that you were going to do earlier in the day. Even the most educational of shows are still entertainment, and they are still taking you away from doing actual real work. There are many more shows that don't have any educational value whatsoever, and those are literally just a waste of time. Wasting time is OK when you're relaxing and you need that time, but only after you've accomplished what you set out to accomplish in the day. Put on music that you can jam too. When I need to do something that I really don't want to do like putting my laundry away, doing it to music somehow makes it so much better. And when you're listening to music you don't really have anything else to do with your hands or with your eyes, so you might as well do something useful.