“Improve your time management to reach your goals”
The first you need to do in order to manage your time, is to have your personal goals and objectives clear.
Do you know the importance of time management?
It helps to:
- Meet deadlines.
- Feeling less stressed while doing activities.
- Have more spare time.
- Reach your goals.
The most common obstacles for a good time management are:
- Inadequate environment (place and lightning).
- Disorder of the materials needed for the activity.
- Difficulty in perceiving the relevance or importance of the activity.
- Dispersion (wanting to work on a lot of tasks at the same time and in the end not finishing any of them).
- Lack of emotional self-control.
- Unclear goals.
- Lack of discipline.
- Lack of motivation.
- Postpone planned activities.
Interruptions can consume a lot of time. Think of unexpected visits, phone calls, noise and distractions we create ourselves, like the internet, our cell phone or Netflix.
In order to control those interruptions, it’s recommended to:
- Create a comfortable work space, with good lightning.
- Learn to say ‘no’ to invitations that conflict with activities that should have your priority, ‘be assertive’.
- Schedule time for social activities. Search for a balance between academic, personal and professional life.
“Classify your activities into important and unimportant, urgent and non-urgent”.
Use an agenda to plan your activities:
- Make a personal schedule and schedule the commitments and dates to work on projects.
- Divide large activities in small steps and task and follow an orden, so you can gradually achieve your goals.
- Make large projects easier to manage, by planning them well.
- Plan activities that will help you to recharge your energy and keep you motivated.
- Don’t forget to do activities that are pleasurable for you, such as listening to music, exercising, or watching a movie.
- Before accepting new commitments, evaluate the quantity of activities you have and how long they will take.
- Check your weekly schedule before saying ‘yes’.
Develop your metacognitive activities and ask yourself from time to time:
- Am I using my time effectively?
- Have I accomplished all the activities I’ve planned for the week?
- What can I do next week to improve the use of my time?
Other recommendations:
- Take 10 minute breaks after each activity.
- Try to find out the time of the day in which it’s easier to concentrate for you personally.
- Make sure you have enough time for each activity, so if there are unexpected situations outside of your control, they do not alter your plans.
- Take some time each week to organize your work utensils.
And remember,
“A good use of time is a source of physical and mental health”
