Some of this also relates to organizing and optimizing your social life, but more broadly to organizing your time. For example, scheduling important tasks and things you want or need to do as social commitments is a good example of how you can organize your time.
But there is much more than that.
Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do to organize your time a little easier.
recognize your limits
The first and absolutely most important point to consider when organizing your time is that you have to consider your own limitations. This is where many of us go wrong because we forget that our energy is finite just like our time.
A perfect example of how to do it wrong is if you write yourself a new training program and diet. We often come up with weight loss plans that essentially involve working out for an extra 3 hours on top of our usual workout routines. weather Also dieting.
So now you have less energy and are expected to start pushing yourself for a total of three hours, plus traveling to and from the gym?
This just doesn’t work.
If you find that you’re not currently doing all the things you’d like to do, then once again you need to prioritize. Do you find that you are not as healthy as you would like to be? Then maybe it’s time to stop going to the pub with your friends once a week. Have you never been able to catch up on housework? Then maybe you need to drop that karate class!
Walk or sit, don’t wobble!
You should also make sure to always give yourself time to recover. In reality, we are much more productive in general when we have been given some time to recover and recharge our batteries. If you are constantly doing one thing after another, you will eventually get tired and stop working properly.
The title of this section is actually an old saying that is particularly relevant to this particular discussion. ‘Walk or sit, don’t wobble’ basically means that you should divide your time between resting and working. This prevents you from getting into those situations where you are ‘half working’.
Working halfway is the worst, because it means you don’t do much but you don’t relax either.
Just as bad is ‘half relaxing’. Half-relaxing is what you do when you’re too tired to do anything useful, but feel like you can’t justify putting on a movie, reading a book, or taking a bath. So instead you just sit there, watching crap on TV. At the end of the day, you have not achieved anything but you have not been able to enjoy free time either.
This is why you need allow yourself that recovery time and then make the most of it. Better yet, schedule it and that way, you can look forward to it while you work.
Timing your tasks
As you decide when to schedule those important tasks and when to schedule rest, it’s helpful to consider the natural ebbs and flows of your energy.
We all have times of the day when we are most productive and times of the day when we crash. Most of us, for example, will find that we crash coming home from work and that we are less productive at work after 4:00 p.m. Similarly, it takes us a little while to get to work. around to be productive.
It’s also important to consider how our other activities impact our energy levels. One of the easiest ways to burn out and want to crash, for example, is to have dinner! Once you’ve eaten, your body needs to digest and that leaves you with little energy to do anything else.
So instead of making dinner, eating on the couch, and then planning to tidy up, housekeeping should always come before eating
Don’t sit on the couch if you want to keep your energy levels up, and don’t eat until you’ve completed at least your most important task. You can always enjoy a light snack when you arrive if you’re too hungry to do anything!
multitask
In the chapter on work, we’ll talk about how multitasking can be a bad thing. However, under the right circumstances, multitasking can be very Useful.
Multitasking at work doesn’t usually work, but in your private life it can be useful in any situation where one of the tasks doesn’t require your full attention.
For example, if you need to go shopping, you can call a friend on your headset while you are shopping. This way you can catch up on your correspondence and at the same time get food – two birds killed with one stone!
Similarly, you can sort through bills while doing the dishes or you can research activities on a tablet while cooking.
This can help you literally accomplish twice as much in many circumstances, so start looking for opportunities to check off more than one of your tasks at a time!
close open loops
A very important tip to help you feel more on top of life is to close all those smaller and more complicated tasks that you consider ‘open loops’.
In the next chapter, we’ll see that it makes sense to work on the biggest and most difficult task first so that you can ensure maximum productivity. However, at home, you should try to do the opposite.
Chores are usually less pressing around the house, so it makes sense to check off the smaller things you have to do so you have less stress and fewer things to worry about.
This means things like paying that bill, things like calling that friend, things like RSVPing to that event. We put off these jobs because we find them stressful and don’t want to spend energy thinking about them. However, as a result, we actually end up worrying about them unconsciously and having less time and energy available to do anything else.
If you have something you can quickly complete that’s playing on your mind, just tell yourself: It has to be done eventually, so it’s best to get it out of the way.
Every day when you get home from work, take half an hour to close those ‘open loops’ so you have a little unconscious ‘to do’ list.
