Managing your bills is easy..I hope. Managing how you're going fight traffic from work to the grocery store to you house is easy as well. Even managing your child in giving them times to eat, brush their teeth, and take a bath is simple. But managing ourselves is another animal.
Our adult lives are scheduled. We wake up. Leave the house at the right time. And know when to take our lunch ? Why ? Our job schedule. The job tells us when to wake up. When to get there. And what you're going to do when you are on the clock until it's time to go home. Then the little time left after work dictates what your going to do.
But what happens when you're not on a work schedule ?
The last few months without a work schedule has taught me some important things. Our lives are dictated by schedule that is not of our until it's the weekend. Some of us have been doing it so long we don't even think about it.
I would waste hours doing actually nothing. Check a email here. Look at mindless videos there on facebook. And oh yeah, fix myself a sandwich because I was hungry ! Before I knew it it was 3pm and I did absolutely nothing !
Once there was ten hours in the day where I knew without thinking what I was suppose to do. There was no thinking to it. Now I was responsible for my time ALL DAY. And I was failing bad ! A week would fly by before I even knew it.
Managing myself
I had to revert back to my military days. Everyday, even in bootcamp, we had a pod (plan of the day). It was basically a list of what we was going to do today. Sometimes it was mundane things like taking the cleaning the building. While other times it was preparing to pack our equipment for a cross country trip. But there was a concrete plan daily.
Yours truly decided to go back to that. Now I'm not in the military anymore. But the equivalent would be using a planner. If you want to get high tech, the smartphone that you may be reading this blog from.
I either wrote down or typed into my google calendar what I am going to do the next day. At minimum it gave me a frame work to go by. I had something to look forward to versus waking up wondering what's next.
That is not enough
You have to cut out the distractions. Yeah you have a plan. But you still have the phone constantly going off. The tv and couch waiting on. And lastly unproductive phone calls. No boss is going to be looking over your should making sure you're sticking to the POD. You remember that right ?!
Here are somethings you can do to better manage yourself.
If you can master managing yourself you can master other things outside of yourself. Try out some of things I shared and see how it works with your day to day activities.
Our adult lives are scheduled. We wake up. Leave the house at the right time. And know when to take our lunch ? Why ? Our job schedule. The job tells us when to wake up. When to get there. And what you're going to do when you are on the clock until it's time to go home. Then the little time left after work dictates what your going to do.
But what happens when you're not on a work schedule ?
The last few months without a work schedule has taught me some important things. Our lives are dictated by schedule that is not of our until it's the weekend. Some of us have been doing it so long we don't even think about it.
I would waste hours doing actually nothing. Check a email here. Look at mindless videos there on facebook. And oh yeah, fix myself a sandwich because I was hungry ! Before I knew it it was 3pm and I did absolutely nothing !
Once there was ten hours in the day where I knew without thinking what I was suppose to do. There was no thinking to it. Now I was responsible for my time ALL DAY. And I was failing bad ! A week would fly by before I even knew it.
Managing myself
I had to revert back to my military days. Everyday, even in bootcamp, we had a pod (plan of the day). It was basically a list of what we was going to do today. Sometimes it was mundane things like taking the cleaning the building. While other times it was preparing to pack our equipment for a cross country trip. But there was a concrete plan daily.
Yours truly decided to go back to that. Now I'm not in the military anymore. But the equivalent would be using a planner. If you want to get high tech, the smartphone that you may be reading this blog from.
I either wrote down or typed into my google calendar what I am going to do the next day. At minimum it gave me a frame work to go by. I had something to look forward to versus waking up wondering what's next.
That is not enough
You have to cut out the distractions. Yeah you have a plan. But you still have the phone constantly going off. The tv and couch waiting on. And lastly unproductive phone calls. No boss is going to be looking over your should making sure you're sticking to the POD. You remember that right ?!
Here are somethings you can do to better manage yourself.
- The planner or google calendar like I said earlier.
- Block off your time in chunks. 45 minutes to work and 15 minutes to rest. When you can measure your productive time you feel more like you've accomplished something. The Pomodaro Technique is a time management system you may want to look at.
- Piggy backing off the time management, own your time. If people know you're free don't allow them to dictate your schedule. Their time frame may not match with yours. If it does not tell them. You're only free after 1pm for example, keep that mandate.
If you can master managing yourself you can master other things outside of yourself. Try out some of things I shared and see how it works with your day to day activities.
Comments
Post a Comment