Start Balancing Your Home and Work Life With Time Management

If you start every day with a rush to get ready for work, have breakfast and leave the house on time, it may be time to consider how you can take back control from the chaos.

If you get to work and spend the first hour trying to remember what you were doing yesterday and prioritise what is urgent, this is a message to yourself. Something isn't working.

If you are spending time on the small details and not giving your mind the time and creative space to enjoy focusing on the work that you enjoy and are truly good at, then you are not being fair to yourself.


The need for time management

Even the most detailed schedule will fail if you do not assess and manage your time honestly. This includes considering your personal, work and family life.

For example, this means allowing for time spent sleeping, eating and bathing which are the basic prerequisites for everyday living. If you start the day tired, hungry and feeling scruffy, you will be struggling to feel professional and productive for the rest of the day.

Effective time management takes into consideration time spent with our work, families and household duties. If we don't "schedule" those different elements into our day, chances are they will be chaotic, or won't happen at all.

Compile a 'to-do' list

Yes, I can hear you thinking that a 'to-do' list is great for planning your household chores but how can it work with individual projects?

Well, it all boils down to effective time management. Research has shown that nearly a third of 'to-do' lists add fuel to the fire as the note taker spends too much time trying to organize a planned regime. Some people use list compiling as a means of postponing the looming task, hence the phrase 'analysis paralysis' which literally means 'to remain stagnant' as a result of over-analyzing.

A 'to-do' list gives you the opportunity to clear your mind of the list of things you need to do, want to do, or feel you should do. It does not have to be neatly presented and carefully thought out. Simple rows of jotted down steps outlining the main functions of the task will suffice. Whilst you are working on one task, you will often find that little reminders pop up in your head, which can be scribbled down and added to the list to help make the completion of the project run smoothly.

Set your own deadlines ahead of the "real" one

We all know it's not a good idea to wait until the last minute but how many of us would far rather complete a task when it is vital that we do so, rather than drag it on for weeks and become obsessive over it?

It is a common fact that we work much better when the clock is ticking away and we have a little pressure added to the mix. After all, a bit of stress is known to help the adrenaline flow and fire up the creative juices. If you find that you are constantly putting off projects until the last minute, you need to put some 'va va voom' into the equation. This way, your brain does not become tired of being constantly focused on one subject.

Once the mind associates a task as being tedious, it will do everything it can to avoid facing it. Therefore, procrastination to an extent can on completing the task rather than focus on the deadline as the objective.

Listen to what your mind is telling you. If you work better with a constant supply of coffee or flitting between an online crossword and your project. Schedule that in. You will keep the brain constantly stimulated, enjoy completing your task much quicker and probably produce more creative and accurate work than ever before.

Allow for interruptions.

It would be a nice idea to be able to go into a concealed room where there are no interruptions and you can just sit back and think in peace. But how long would it be before you started thinking about making another coffee or scratching your arm, taking a little stretch or a small walk up and down the room?

Don't beat yourself up over interruptions as they keep the mind stimulated and help ideas to flow. The phone will ring, colleagues will require your help but with a good time management approach, you will see that they will not hamper your efforts to succeed. In fact, the word interruption means intermission which, in effect, is a short break away from what you are doing... in many cases, this will recharge the batteries and add renewed energy to a project.