Balancing Your Time in a World Of Distractions

Are you exhausted from trying to fit 40 hours of work into 24 hours, day after day in your workplace while trying to maintain a home life? Your energy level is LOW; thus affecting work productivity and ability to reach your goals, while your stress level is HIGH. You wonder if you can juggle these modern, busy times with a career, kids, and other activities. Is there a way that you can get tasks done more efficiently so that you have TIME to do what matters to YOU?

According to the January 20, 2021 issue of FORBES , “Practicing different time management techniques to see which one may work best for you can help lower stress, increase productivity and is a great way to kick off the new year.” Begin with making a plan for the day (a to-do list), before you go to bed for the next day. This will help you mentally prepare yourself for challenges, work faster, and more efficiently. Thus, the tasks will be prioritized. “Urgent tasks should be the highest priority, then look at any high-value tasks, while relegating low-priority tasks to the back of the queue.” Then eliminate unnecessary distractions because they can limit your productivity and cause you to lose your focus for great lengths of time.

Do some people have more time than others? It sure seems like it, right! How? They find a good time management system and work it. Balance is essential. Without it, you will feel the stresses of life. It’s important to follow a system, or techniques, that will help get tasks accomplished and will also help prioritize your work and personal time for a balanced life. As you climb that ladder, don’t forget that life is about more than just a job, you need to care for yourself and enjoy personal and family time or you may reach your breaking point. Life is too short so don’t ignore yourself while you reach for your goals. Entrepreneur , TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS, shares “15 Time Management Tips for Achieving Your Goals” with that balance in mind. “Set goals the right way. There’s a right and wrong way to set goals. If you don’t set your goals the right way, then you’ll lack the proper targets, which will force you to fall off track. But when you set them the right way, the sky is the limit…Make sure you have powerful deep down meanings for wanting to achieve them.”

Other tips to employers are:

• Your tasks should only be urgent or important and you should spend your mornings on your most important tasks of the day. In other words, you should tackle the biggest tasks in the morning because you have the most energy and it will give you the biggest momentum to help you sail through the rest of the day.

• You should “instill keystone habits into your life – this helps to not only solicit other good habits, but also helps to eliminate bad habits as well…One of the biggest time-wasters we have are our bad habits…Use your time wisely by eliminating your bad habits if you’re serious about achieving big goals in life.

• Schedule time to read and respond to emails; therefore, turn off your email throughout the day because the distractions will interrupt your thought flow and it will be harder to get back on track.

• Meditate or exercise each morning to give yourself balance, and also cut out toxins to help your energy level, stamina and mental focus take a drastic shift, along with frequent breaks when working.

• Find inspiration when you’re lacking inspiration, turn-off social media app alerts for peace of mind and focus, get a good mentor to help you in your journey, and finally begin to de-clutter and organize to help yourself gain focus and control. It’s entirely up to you to get serious about improving your quality of life and taking charge of achieving your goals by employing a good time management system that works for you.

The more thought you invest into setting priorities before you begin a task, the faster you will get the important things done. The more important and valuable the task is to you, the more motivated you are to overcome procrastination and launch yourself into the job. Master Priority Setting According to my powerful time-management techniques that I have used for years, begin with listing and prioritizing. Prioritizing goes deeper: MUST DO (serious consequences), SHOULD DO (minor consequences), and NICE TO DO (no consequences) – and must be completed in order. Next, I promote delegating – an activity that you can delegate or assign to someone else. The rule is that you should delegate everything that you possibly can to other people. This frees up more time for you to engage in your must do activities. I conclude with eliminate – an activity or something that you should eliminate altogether. After all, you can only get your time under control if you stop doing things that are no longer necessary for you to do…Discipline yourself, use willpower, and complete the job.

In order to improve your time management, you need to spend your time on valuable activities and develop new habits, thus accomplishing more. Make a rule for yourself to never do anything that isn’t on your list. If a new task arises, write it down on your list and set the priority for it before you start work on it.

“If you react and respond to the nonstop demands on your time, you will quickly lose control of your day. You end up spending most of your time on activities of low or no value.” - Coach Jason Ballard

Contact Coach Jason Ballard to schedule a complimentary goal planning session.