If you’ve been reading this blog series on time management, you would be familiar with the three core principles of time management – time is allocation, time is energy, and time is money. While understanding each of these is fundamental to making a change in your life, there’s also a subtle perspective shift or perhaps a change in mindset that will go a long way towards managing your time better.

“I don’t have the time for X” ----------------------------> “X is not my priority”

We’ve all been in situations where we rationalise our behaviour saying that we don’t have the time to attend a course, or to stick to an exercise regime, etc. By rephrasing your statement this way, you’ll realise that what you actually mean is that the course/exercise/X is not a priority for you. Try this right now. Think about the instances you said this in the recent past and you’ll gain a good understanding of what ‘X’ represents in your life. This exercise will help you re-evaluate how you are spending your time.

Three Quick Tips to Manage Time Better

Now that we’ve covered the perspective shift, let’s look at a few tips for time management that will prove useful to plan your day-to-day activities and schedule.

• Two-minute rule: Any task that requires you to spare only 2 minutes deserves your attention right away. Do it now and finish it off so it doesn’t lie as an open item in your planner. It will only end up taking longer to organise and review it at a later point.
• Establish routines: Fix a time for when you wake up, exercise, eat, sleep, and so on. Try to stick to this on a daily basis. It will bring order to your life and decrease the possibility of lowered energy levels. The other advantage with building such habits is that you don’t have to spend time thinking about the activity anymore. It sort of becomes automatic.
• Block your calendar: Start highlighting the key activities in your day. You could do this either on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This helps you allocate and manage time without taking on unnecessary stress.

Book Recommendations

The last part of this blog post leaves you with a curated list of book recommendations from your coach. There are a lot of resources that you’ll find online which talk about time management. But these three books by well-known authors are especially helpful for anyone who is serious about taking charge of their time and their life:

• Atomic Habits: An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones by James Clear
• Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity by David Allen
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful lessons in personal change by Stephen R. Covey

That brings us to the end of this blog series on time management with your coach Manoj Radhakrishna. If you’ve gone through all five posts, you would have learnt quite a few principles and simple frameworks that can help you get better at managing your time. The trick is to go with the 80/20 rule which essentially states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts.

Identify that 20% for yourself from this module, pick out the points that work best for you, and start implementing them without procrastinating. Over a period of time, you will see that you’ve mastered the art of using your time effectively. It’s a life skill that will hold you in good stead throughout your professional career and otherwise.