Women at Work: Meticulous time management
Does your self-improvement plan include arriving on time to engagements and having more you time or family time? Then consider keeping a daily calendar with an hourly schedule and employing organizing games to help encourage your enthusiasm for work and mastery of your time.
In Stephen Covey’s, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, his research shows the importance of keeping a daily time oriented calendar. It allows you to visualize openings or where you may be overbooking. You can also identify important roles, goals and priorities, when scheduling appointments and making commitments. For example if family time is important to you, are you booking appointments when your kids get home from school or during meal time?
When you first begin tracking your time, it may seem tedious, but with the aid of our smart devices, many calendars are pre-installed on our phones and tablets. Be realistic in areas such as personal grooming or commuting. It often takes longer than we think and you could end up beginning your day behind schedule.
Lynne Maher, owner of Supportive Organizing Solutions, suggests another great tool to her clients; create an open to-do list, rather than a do-today list. Allot specific time beside each task you’d like to accomplish, but not necessarily today. For example, if you’re working from home, you may want to complete some housework as well as business tasks. So your list for housework may be: vacuum den — 10 min., dust bedroom — 15 min., fold laundry — 30 min., etc. So, when an opening appears in your schedule, chose an activity from the open to-do-list that fits the time slot.
When you breakdown tasks into manageable pieces and track your time and keep a schedule you may find that you get more done, are never late and have more time because you are in control of it!
AnnMarie Depoian serves as Regional Vice President of Primerica Financial Services, The Depoian Team. She can be reached at (585) 339-9681 or annmariedepoian@primerica.com. This column is written by members of the Rochester Women's Network (rwn.org).