Free Time Management Tips
Do you feel like there’s just not enough hours in each day? Do you struggle with a heavy load and never able to accomplish everything that needs to be done? If you find yourself worn out from being rushed all the time, try these free time management tips to get yourself back on track again:
TIME MANAGEMENT TIP #1: Drop half your work load. You’re probably thinking that isn’t possible, but it is. The truth is that you can most likely stop doing half of what you do every day and nobody would be any worse of because of it. Overloading yourself, whether at work or at home, creates a vicious cycle of never having enough time because you have way too much to do.
TIME MANAGEMENT TIP #2: Get a planner…and use it. Whether a paper planner or digital, this could be your best friend in a few weeks. As soon as you have an appointment, make note of it in your planner. You’ll use your planner to stay focused and on task and should never be late for another appointment again.
TIME MANAGEMENT TIP #3: Turn off the phone. The telephone is, next to the Internet, one of the biggest time wasters ever. When you’re ready to start working on an important project or task, turn off the ringer on your telephone. When you finish the task, you can turn the ringer back on again. This will prevent interruptions that could cause you to become sidetracked.
TIME MANAGEMENT TIP #4: Let someone else do it. In addition to dropping half your work load, start doling out responsibilities to others. At home, put your children in charge of household chores, like laundry or dirty dishes. At work, form a team and hand out task sheets for everyone to pull together and get the job done.
7 Simple Steps to End Procrastination
Putting things off until the last minute is never conducive to a peaceful mind. Instead, you end up with a headache, anxiety attack and heartburn, not to mention a TO DO list that’s a mile long because you’ve been putting it off all week long. If you’re tired of the stress produced by your procrastination, try these 7 simple steps to stop your procrastination today.
1. Write a daily TO DO list. If you aren’t already writing a TO DO list every day, start now. Not everyone likes TO DO lists, but they help you see what needs to be done. They also give you a visual of what you’ve already completed.
2. Condense your TO DO list. Lots of people make the mistake of making a TO DO list that is a mile long. Don’t make this mistake. If your TO DO list contains more than 20 tasks, condense it down to about 10 tasks or so.
3. Forget about what isn’t important. When condensing your TO DO list, cross off any tasks that are small or meaningless. Your TO DO list should never include things like brushing your teeth or making your bed. Those are considered everyday tasks and do not belong on your list.
4. Delegate. There will always be some tasks that you don’t have to do yourself. Dole out more responsibility to your family and ease some of your own load.
5. Treat yourself for a job well done. If you worked really hard at completing a task then received no recognition for it, you probably subconsciously thought it must have not been very important. These negative self-messages generate laziness that makes you want to procrastinate later. Start treating yourself for completing a major task on your list.
6. Take a look over your shoulder. When you’re working on a large task, it’s always important to stop for a minute and check your progress. This will always motivate you to keep working hard.
7. Live like there’s no tomorrow. Another biggie is telling yourself that you can just do it tomorrow. What if you didn’t have a tomorrow? What would you get done today? Live like this every day.
Relieve Your Stress With A Hobby
Stress is one of the major factors of depression. With growing demands of everyday life, stress can quickly pull you down. One of the easiest ways to relieve stress is to have a hobby.
Maybe you’d like to take up a hobby but aren’t sure what to do. Here are some great ideas for stress-soothing hobbies:
- Wood burning and carving – Men especially find wood burning projects very calming and soothing. Likewise, sculpting beautiful images from wood can be not only a stress reliever, but rewarding hobby as well.
- Ceramics – Ceramics is almost a lost art today. However, the process of taking a raw piece and creating a beautiful work of art is a very rewarding hobby.
- Reading for pleasure – If you do a lot of reading every day for your business, then you probably don’t read for pleasure any more. Grab a book in a genre that you’d never read and give it a go.
- Hand embroidery – Designing and creating beautiful fiber art by hand is extremely calming.
- Golf – Golf has been widely used as a stress-relieving hobby. Many golf enthusiasts claim that golf can take your mind off your problems and greatly reduce your stress levels.
No matter what hobby you take up, the idea is to do something to relieve stress. Set aside time every week to work on your hobby and you’ll soon find that your stress levels will be greatly reduced in very little time.
Brainstorm Your Way to Better Health
UC Medical Center Women’s Health Research Program conducted a research which showed that women are more prone to depression than men. Furthermore, evidence proved that healthy women produce less serotonin than men. What does this mean? For women who already have a low level of serotonin, stress can totally wipe out the remaining, which leads to an onslaught of depression.
Perhaps one of the reasons for women being more susceptible to depression than men is because we are the caregivers. We take care of our families and everyone else and put ourselves on the back burners. It is time to stand up and make a positive change, though. Here are several ways you can brainstorm your way to better health:
1) Write down 5 ways you would like your health to improve.
2) List 4 reasons why you need to work harder on improving your health.
3) Write down every person in your family who has health problems and list what problems they are. Now put a check by the ones that you are experiencing right now.
Continue brainstorming in this fashion. Sometimes it just takes a cold, harsh dose of reality to wake you up.
After you get all these things on paper, now start over and brainstorm all things you can do to become proactive in your life. List all the tiny changes you can start to make. Once you get busy working n the little things, the bigger things will become easier to change, too.
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