“Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time.”

M Scott Peck

1. Track your time – create a spreadsheet in half hour blocks for each day of the week. Record when you are sleeping and all your other activities. Initially this may seem like you are “time wasting” but you will be surprised at what actually does take up your time. Include things such as time taken to travel to various places, shopping, showering, eating, etc.
2. Prioritise – make a list of what is important. Sleep should be up there as a significant block of time as is time to spend with your nearest and dearest ones. Make sure you identify the difference between your regular “to do list” and projects you are undertaking. Set some deadlines for the completion of the tasks. You might also want to identify which activities are “fun” to do and those that are not. Reward yourself by doing the less fun ones first and the enjoyable ones later.
3. Schedule or timetable everything else. Be flexible – you may want to create several schedules so that you get some variety each week. If you need to be on social media for your business, or answer emails then set aside some time to do that. There are numerous scheduling tools that can be used to automatically post to various platforms, but do make some of your posts spontaneous! For instance, I have a set time once a week to write blog posts (like this one). In that time I will write on a number of topics and save to a document to use later when I have scheduled in clients or have set time aside to prepare for upcoming workshops.
4. Stop procrastinating – be honest with yourself. What excuses or reasons are you coming up with to justify your inaction? Do you value yours and other people’s time? Have you allowed enough time to get to your appointments?
5. Focus – or learn the art of mindfulness. Multi tasking is so last century….. when your attention is divided, your energy is scattered. If you are following your schedule then you will complete tasks in what seems like no time at all. If your attention span is short, then schedule the tasks into small but incremental steps… the foundation of successful goal setting!