We’ve all experienced it. We make a To Do list that starts with maybe a dozen or so items and before we know it – its the end of the day/week/month and we maybe got four of the items on our list done.
Where did the time go?
Everyone has either read about or heard about time management and best practices to corral it in. But have you actually executed what you’ve read or heard about? Now I’m not saying I’m good at it and I make it work, because that’d be wrong. I do try however and so far the method I’ve chosen seems to be working.
Time for me to fess up. In a prior life (a.k.a. before I decided to be a full time professional photographer and help people to Breakout of the Boring) I was a software development project manager. I managed projects ranging from small (a few thousands of dollars) to large (in excess of a million dollars). So you can imagine all the ‘moving’ pieces and parts to a large statewide project involving teams in India, local and throughout the state. In this role I used various methods and systems of time trackers, planners and project management tools. These helped me to ensure that my projects were always delivered on time and on budget(yeah right!). But how many of us need to track and manage our time to this kind of minutia – not too many of us.
For most of us something between a To Do list and a detailed Ghant chart is all we need to keep ourselves on track.
It all starts with a goal. Write down what you want to accomplish. Then give it a time frame. Do you want to get it done; this year, this quarter, this month, this week or today. Do this for each of your goals – what you want to get done. The principle here is to think in terms of projects and break them down into smaller manageable pieces.
Once you’ve written down your goals with their time frames you can start breaking them down. If its a quarterly goal then you need to write down what needs to happen this month to move this objective further. Just keep breaking it down. For each week this month, what activities are you doing to move forward with your objectives. At the end of the week – did you do the tasks/calls etc. that you planned?
By writing down your goals and objectives you can then track your progress on completing them. One method I found helpful were free ‘momentum planners from Productivity Flourishing at www.productiveflourishing.com/free-planners
[DISCLAIMER: Created Portraits has no affiliation with them in any way, shape or form].
Hopefully this will help you wrangle all those loose ends that seem to never get done.
If you found this helpful then please let us know in the comments below.