People who have made a success of their lives have four key habits. Learn their time management habit and make a success of your life.

 

See 4 Habits All Successful People Have

 

Of these four success habits, the key time one is:

“They maintain balance in life, have time for relationships and love, take care of themselves and their health”.

You can do this, it is not so difficult as you might think, 2 Simple Steps and I can help you on each.

 

Step 1 Balance

Getting the right balance for success is both a mental process and a mathematical one.

When you are at work you worry about being at home, and when your at home, your mind is churning over what needs doing at work. This can lead to anxiety, if not guilt, and can make life stressful and frustrating and impacts on you not achieving success in either environments. Not good for you, your work or your family.

I recall when my children were growing up, feeling guilty of not being around till late at night. I tried to compensate this by making sure I spent Saturday mornings with them.

Like many things it is a question of attitude and approach. In a Huffington Post, Kara Baskin wrote of a different approach. By thinking of it as a work/life “merge;” instead of seeing you work, and life as independent of each other, seeing them as one. After all, you are not just working for yourself, your family benefits to.

So, drop the guilt part, look at it as all part of your life and achieve success by focussing on getting a good daily balance for that future you desire.

 

This informatic gives you some idea how the average person spends their day.

Of course there are two types of day. A working day and a rest day; so you need to see how these work out overall.

When I did this I found that over the week I was quite happy with the amount of time I spent at work overall, but I was not so happy with other aspects. So I started to tackle them bit by bit. I’ll tell you how in another post.

 

Step 2 Self Care

I had a student who was a manager in a care home. Being a caring person was natural to her, but the problem was she did not take care of herself.

It was just before Christmas and she was struggling with her assignments. I discovered that whilst trying to hold down a stressful job, she not only had a husband to look after, but his mother too.

I was careful not to add to her woes, and stressed that she needed to be a bit more selfish and that if anything happened to her, what would her care home residents, husband and mother-in-law do then?

She did not make her post christmas tutorial; she was off for 3 months with a breakdown.

If you do not take care of yourself, then you cannot take care of others.

One key element of self care is Sleep.  It has been the subject of much research and discussion, particularly in relation to success at work. Research has shown that a good sleep is required to ensure you achieve peak productivity, healthcare and sex!

Of course it depends on your definition of “success” and it seems some well known people in this category can get away with less sleep. but that is not the norm and many people who have achieved success will have a different lifestyle to.

So I suggest you allow for 8 hours and plan for it. If you need less then you automatically create some slack in your schedule.

The one realisation I had from this exercise was that I did not have 24 hours in a day. That in reality I had about 11-12 hours a day. I was thinking I had more time than I did have. I started to appreciate it was a capacity issue. My actual capacity to do things was less than the workload I wanted to take on both work wise and outside work. I was too involved in too many things

 

Summary

To be successful with time then, you need to:

Get a good understanding of your daily capacity and consider the balance you have between the time you spend working and the time you spend doing things for yourself and with your own friends and family. You can use my Capacity Tip 1 (free download) to help you get started on working out just how much capacity each day you really have, rather than what you perceive you have.

Be sure you are taking care of yourself. Make sure you are getting enough sleep, eating well and getting some form of exercise even if it is just some simple walking.

Best Wishes

Trevor

This post first appeared on my blog at
www.timelyness.co.uk
The Art of Making Work Fit the Time you want to give it.
The 21st Century alternative to Time Management