Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash
Today I just want to share a short post about time management.
I'll discuss an easy way to plan your time and check by the end of the week to see what you have done with your time.
It's an easy and simple, yet effective method. It's a method that I've seen many entrepreneurs are using and I often use it myself.
All you need is your Google Calendar (or any other online calendar that works in a similar fashion).
Create an "Ideal Week" calendar. This is where you would plan your "ideal" week as you think it should be.
Once you have created the calendar, start blocking time out for each activity that you want to do over the next week. You can color-code each activity for easy identification (optional if you want).
Let's create the calendar.
Open your calendar. In the menu on the left, find "other calendars". Click on the plus to open the menu.
From the menu, choose "create new calendar" to create your calendar which you can call "Ideal Week".
Before you fill in your calendar, you can use an Excel spreadsheet to calculate how much time you want to spend on each activity you want to do in the following week.
Once you are happy with the time you have allocated to each activity, you can fill in your "Ideal Week" calendar.
I have just filled in some sample activities to show what it would look like.
You can allocate time in any way you want. You can even block out a whole day for one specific activity if you want. This is just an example.
But it would look something like this.
Now, each activity you fill in on your "Ideal Week" calendar, should be copied to your personal calendar on which you actually work.
To copy the activity, as you create your entry/activity, click on "More Options" to fully open the entry with all options available.
Then click on "More Actions", and choose the calendar to which you want to copy. This will obviously be the calendar you will actively be using during the following week.
Complete your schedule for next week by allocating time for each activity in both calendars. As I mentioned, you just create the activity in your "ideal Week" calendar and immediately copy it to the other calendar of your choice.
Once you have completed that and you now go to the Calendar menu on the left and tick both your "Ideal Week" calendar, and also the calendar of your choice on which you prefer to work, it will now look as if all your activities are duplicated.
That will be ideal after you have finished your week if your calendars can still look like this after the next week has been completed.
But we all know it doesn't always work that way in reality.
So, once you have created your "Ideal Week" calendar and all the activities are duplicated on ... let's call it your "Active Calendar", you untick your "Ideal Week" calendar and only work from your active calendar.
As time goes by and you spend more time in one activity, cancel another, add a meeting or two, you just edit your "Active Calendar" on the go as you go through the week.
After you have completed the week, you tick the boxes of both calendars and you'll see something like this...
In the example above, you can see that on Monday, I spent more time creating content than what was planned for originally. I also moved my time for social media out by one hour.
On Wednesday I had a meeting which I didn't plan for originally, which meant that I didn't do any reading and/or research for the day as planned.
On Saturday I did my walk/workout 30 minutes later than planned.
Conclusion.
This post is only supposed to serve as a guideline if you are battling with time management.
if you do this for a couple of weeks, you should start seeing patterns. You'll see where you are wasting time or where there are times that you cannot account for.
That should help you to start planning your time better in the future.
If you feel this method can help you, feel free to use it and share it with your friends.
I've learned about this method quite some time ago, and often when I feel I'm losing control over my time, I just discipline myself with this method until I get things back on track.
It's simple. It's easy and I find it effective. It might take a couple of extra minutes to do your planning before you start the week, but you'll end up being more productive in the long run.
I hope this helps.
If you need any help or if something is not clear, please feel free to ask.
Thank you for reading my post. I do appreciate it.
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