In my recent blog, I wrote about my experience my experience in homeschooling, and what I learned in these 4 years of learning through this way. One of the skills I wrote down, as being acquired through my experience was time-management.
Time-management itself is a very useful skill to have. I accomplish more than on those days that I make a plan and stick to it, comparatively to when I simply drift by on a day like a raft that does so on water. And I have concluded that to be able to organize and and work as efficiently as time allows is a stairway to success.
But time-management, I find, is not such an easy skill to practice. In theory, it is extremely simple; keep a todo-list and at the end of the day note down the tasks you did not accomplish and why. However, there are many factors that interfere with our plans and stop us from completing them. Sometimes, they are external factors such as unexpected events (like your friends calling you to join them) or internal factors such as laziness or a lack of motivation.
In this post I will first show you the common methods to organize your time. Then I shall address some factors and show you the way I managed to overcome them.
Methods to Organize Time
As complicated as time structuring may appear to be, it is in fact extremely simple. I generally recommend following writing a to-do list and a retrospect for each day, week and month.
Each day’s to-do should align with the goals set in the weekly to-do list and that align with the goals of the monthly to-do and so on. The retrospect on the other hand, is a chance to look back on how you accomplished your goals, and what you did right and what you did not.
So not only do you have a clear plan for the way forward, but you also have the opportunity to learn from mistakes on your path. With this alone, you should be able to organize your time and already see success. However, I still think it is necessary for us to discuss the factors that commonly disrupt my plans and how I went about avoiding them.
Factors
As I mentioned before, there are two types of factors that usually disrupt your plan. Firstly, is the external factors such as a sudden event or change of plans. Secondly, is the internal factors; basically your mood and feelings that really affect your plans.
External Factors
External factors are generally just sudden events that occur that cause you to change your plans. For example, suddenly having to go shopping or perhaps an event that took longer than planned.
When these things occur, it may disrupt your perfectly planned to-do list. Make sure to keep in mind that the time you had lost is lost for good. So instead, you should prioritize the tasks you deem most important and do them first.
With this you would be able to effectively make use of your time in spite of sudden changes in your plans.
Internal Factors
Internal factors are emotions such as demotivation, laziness and numbness that prevent us from putting our all into our work. I have frequently noticed that 1 hour of fully motivated and energized work is far superior than 4 hours of demotivated and distracted work.
So how should you combat these emotions that stop us? I think it is important to mention that even I haven’t fully defeated this problem and it still remains a constant thorn in my path.
In any case firstly, we must first accept these emotions as our own. It is in our nature to get demotivated, burn out or distracted. After all we are not robots and our bodies do need it’s due rest. However, if these emotions persist then that means they usually have a cause.
For example, momentary demotivation can simply be because of tiredness or a huge workload; in that case, all you really need is some rest. But what do you do when it doesn’t stop? Although the reasons might differ as they are completely subjective, I would say constant demotivation could also originate from feeling lost (rather than laziness as that itself needs a cause.)
When you don’t have a purpose in your actions, you might start to feel lost. After all, how can you travel from ‘A’ to ‘B’ if you don’t have a ‘B’? Then once you have found the cause, all you need is a solution. Perhaps it’s a passionate goal, a vision of an ideal life or simply an idea you want to test.
So as it is in these scenarios, you must find the cause to your emotions and slowly work on them.
In Conclusion
To summarize, time structuring is really simple; write a to-do list, retrospect and fix mistakes, and… repeat. This is the structure I have used and found useful and till now it has been showing results.
If you enjoyed reading this post, you can check out other posts I have written and if you would like you can give me feedback on my post through comments.
Thanks for reading!