How to Effectively Manage Your Time & Simplify Your Life

Confession time, my productivity has seriously stunk lately. I feel like I have been spending hours on tasks and accomplishing very little. When this happens instead of simplifying your life, life begins to feel complicated. Here I am writing articles on ways to simplify your life and manage your time management and I’m failing miserably.

The good thing is that it’s kicked my butt in gear to figure out what the problem is, why I’m failing when I’m normally very productive. I understand the value of my time and the short supply of it. For this reason, I want to make sure I manage my time well so that I have time for the things that matter most!

7 Action Items to Effectively Manage Your Time and Simplify Your Life

What I found is that the areas where I am struggling are the areas in which I don’t have a clear plan of what I want to accomplish.

Having a clear goal, purpose or intention lies at the heart of both simplicity and managing your time well! In other words, if you are not intentionally working toward something specific, productivity suffers. Life will get incredibly complicated and crazy when you’re trying to do it all.  This makes having a clear focus on what you want to accomplish all the more important.

These are the seven simple time management tasks that help me get clear on what is important and back on track in simplifying my life.

1. Brain Dump
2. Plan out Your Schedule
3. Know Your limits
4. Delegate
5. Prioritize
6. Focus on Your Goals
7. Take a Day Off

Now let’s look at putting each of these into action!

1. Start With a Brain Dump

I know I have said this before, but it deserves regular repeating, our brains have a limited capacity, there is only so much information that we can store in our mind. The more information we try to keep in our brain, the more decisions we make throughout the day the more fatigued we become.

I wrote more about what decision fatigue is and how it works here if you have not read that you should do so now.

The point of brain dumping is to write EVERYTHING down as it comes into your brain. I personally think that nothing beats good old-fashioned pen and paper. I use a regular spiral-bound notebook that cost me less than one dollar from Staples.

As things that need to get done, or ideas I want to try, come into my mind, I write them down in that notebook.  This way I have them all in one place.

The next step is to start organizing all those items on the paper. List them out in order of importance and work on those things that matter the most first! By having a list in from of you, you free up your mind to focus on specific tasks. 

2. Planning Out Your Schedule to Manage Your Time and Simplify Your Life

We live in an age driven by busyness, we often have countless demands on our time on any given day. Trying to accomplish those tasks without a plan and schedule, is what creates so much stress in our lives. When you take a few minutes each day to plan out and look at your schedule, you can arrange your tasks to allow you to accomplish much more in less time.

If you know that you have to pick your child up from school or another activity, plan your errands so that you only have to go out once. For example, I pick my son up from school at 3:00, so I will plan my trip to the bank for either right before or right after I pick him up.

I can also plan to take care of certain tasks while I am waiting for any appointments my children may have. My Son has an appointment every Tuesday that takes about one hour. I always plan to do my bible study during this appointment time.

The same is true with meals. If you know that you need to start dinner each night at 5:00, don’t start working on a project at 4:30 that you know will take you more than 30 minutes to complete. Instead, schedule time to work on that project earlier in the day or later in the evening.

I designed my printable planner, which is free for all members of the It’s My Favorite Day Community, with separate spaces for you and your children’s activities. There are also spaces for planning your week’s meals, phone calls you need to make, and things you need to remember. You can see how I use the calendar here, or sign-up for the newsletter here and get weekly tips to help you simplify life! 

3. Know Your Limits

Take on only those tasks that you can reasonably handle without compromising your sanity and your family time. There are always pulls on your time, but the truth is that no matter what you do, you only have 24 hours on a given day.

You cannot do everything.  If you try to do everything, the only thing that you will accomplish is to overwhelm yourself.  Saying no to those things that do not fit within your priorities, will help you achieve your goals, and bring real joy into your life.

I know it can be so hard to say no, the truth is I enjoy helping other people. But, if I overextend myself, I find that I am resentful and no longer helping because I want to, but because I feel some obligation. At this point, I am no longer serving anybody and something or someone is sure to suffer when I overextend myself.

So learn to say no to those things that do not fit within your priorities!

4. Delegate

This is, without a doubt, the hardest area for me to put into practice. I tend to want to do it myself because I think I can do it quickly and it’s easier than asking someone for help. But this is just wrong thinking.

I often have to remind myself that in Exodus 18, God instructed Moses to delegate, through his father-in-law, so that Moses would not be overwhelmed. Clearly, delegation is important!

We simply cannot do everything and will get overwhelmed if we try. Take a lesson from Moses, learn to delegate simple tasks, and learn to ask for help. In the end, you will accomplish much more in a much shorter period of time.  The result will be to leave you with time to enjoy your family and the things that fill you up.

5. Prioritize

A key component of eliminating stress and overwhelm is learning to prioritize our tasks. Whether your to-do list concerns your schooling, work, home, or your husband and children, you need to figure out what the most important tasks are, that need to be accomplished for the day. Once you have determined your priorities, take your to-do list, and assign a number next to each task in order of importance.

Now work on that to-do list in the order you have set. In other words, do not work on task #5 before you’ve completed task #1. When you are accomplishing those most important tasks first, life will feel much simpler, I promise! Working on your priorities first is key to manage your time well!

6. Focus on Your Goals

First, make sure you set defined goals for the tasks you are working on. There is a reason you are doing what you are doing, do you have a clear idea of what that is and what you want to accomplish? Setting small goals will give you a clear direction on what is most important! 

Goals will also help direct your time. Once you have a clear and defined goal, you need to keep that goal in focus on those overwhelming days. Focusing on your ultimate goal will keep you motivated. Often that motivation outweighs the stress that you are feeling from so many tasks.

This, in turn, will then keep you on track so that you avoid wasting time.

7. Take a Day Off

It seems counter-intuitive to manage your time by doing nothing, however, you need to have some downtime and enjoy your family. Believe me, I get it, and in a sense, I am preaching to the choir here, it is so hard to stop and play with the kids when so much else needs to be done.

There are always going to be more things to do than there is time to do it, so you need to learn to prioritize.  Sometimes you have to set aside the urgent for the important. And rest is important!!

No matter how many pressing and urgent tasks you have on your plate, the truth is that nothing is more important than taking some time off. Whether you believe it or not, taking time off is what will give you the energy to complete those urgent tasks. When you regularly take time off, you spend less time doing the extraneous things, and the important stuff still gets done.

FREE PRODUCTIVITY TEST

Want some insight into how well you are managing your time? I found this really fun productivity assessment test, over at Michael Hyatt’s website.  The test is free to take and will let you know the truth about how productive you are? You can find out in what ways your workload is getting the best of you… or vice versa. Click here to take the test.