I used to say in my twenties if you spend an hour a day for a year, you can accomplish anything, which has some truth.
The full truth is everything is more complex, competitive, and more in-depth than it once was in times past.
Additionally, every organization on earth is trying to get you to waste your time instead of you being able to control it.
Generations of old would tell you the amount of money (luck) or your DNA you begin with determines success or failure in life.
But, today we know better.
Learning how to manage time, what I call time buckets, is the hidden in plain sight secret to accomplishing anything in life.
Here’s how to do it in 5-steps,
- Determine why you want to manage your time
- Define the reality of your current season
- Define the necessary progress in future seasons
- Create a custom time routine for this week
- Learn how to never fail too long in time management again.
Ready to start directing your life?
Know this first.
Time | The Ultimate Equal Opportunity Employer
The same amount of time each day is dealt to you, me, and everyone in the world to pursue any opportunity.
Time knows no sex or ethnic differences, the color of skin or hair; it does not care if you have mounds of money or none; it is an equal opportunity available to all.
Therefore, time is one of the most significant assets of your kingdom, which is your life.
The stark reality of what happens to your life when you can’t manage time is this:
If you don’t time manage productively, every moment of your day is controlled by others who can manage their time and use the range of their effective will, their kingdom, to accomplish
- their dreams,
- goals,
- and desires for the world and their life.
When you control, direct, and manage your time, the dreams and goals you have in your home, side hustles, business, life, and the world become a reality.
Want to advance your ideas, goals, hobbies, and kingdom?
Learn how to control one of the most potent talents: 168 hours of time each week, and it begins in your home.
How can you manage time at home?
To manage time at home, you need fight the war on two fronts:
- Eliminate the need to use the majority of free time at home wasting time on Netflix, video games, social media, TV shows, and more.
- Eradicate false fears that you can not accomplish any goal you set for your life.
Why do you participate in social media and shows instead of accomplishing goals for your life at home?
You need to check out and consume at home to rejuvenate your energy just enough, so you can spend your time on accomplishing the goals of the institution or company where you work.
This is the cycle of what happens to your time at home every day.
Read through it at least three times; it will make your mind go mad and start to spin, which is what you are doing in life.
But there’s one other reason as well: Fear.
You start to worry that even if you manage the time for a side hustle, dream, or goal, that that aim will not pay off.
This unrealistic fear is a lie from demons holding you back from your purpose in life.
This fear is also a cycle that must end, and both begin to die today.
And the bottom line?
You must spend less time consuming and more time creating.
Let’s get things underway.
How to Direct Your Time in 5-Steps
Does good time management require time management ideas and a plan?
Not exactly.
When trying to begin the management of time, what most do is start new diets, set goals, new year’s resolutions, and more.
Fact: These important tasks are all easy to start, but the odds against achieving success in this way are against you.
Why?
These goals are often chosen by an external motivation, which is why determining a worthwhile goal that has a larger “why win” than the entropy of easy living is critical.
How does this help?
When you make your motivation more significant than the barriers you face, you win.
Motivation > Barriers
How do you increase your motivation?
You must define what you truly want and accurately determine your most important tasks.
Here’s step one.
Determine Why You Want to Manage Time (a.k.a. Your Life!)
To uncover appropriate time goals, you must shift your focus to identity, instead of giving attention to a goal outside of your control.
Here’s a few examples to get what this means:
Want to lose weight?
Yes, you want to lose weight, but the “weight” that lingers is a sign of an unhealthy lifestyle. You want to be a healthy person.
Want to make a living by selling art?
Yes, you want to paint and sell art, but you want to be an artist.
Want to make money blogging?
Yes, you want to have cash coming in from a blog, but you want to be a stay at home blogger.
What do healthy individuals, full-time artists, and bloggers have in common?
They understood the game and embraced the problem of identity and effective time management.
The Puzzle of Time Management and Identity:
Artists, bloggers, healthy people, musicians, or baristas didn’t earn their names overnight.
What is the game? The puzzle you must embrace?
You earn an identity, being called by that name from the devotion of time to mundane routines.
This identity plays out in everything from
- being Buddha, Gandhi, Christlike, or healthy
- to being able to get paid or supported by others doing what you want to do in life
- to having peace in your home.
What do you want your identity to be in 3-years?
You can make some of it a reality this week.
The first thing to do is: Make sure you assess the reality of your current season.
Here’s how to do it.
Define Your Season
To accomplish the identity you desire, there are two seasons you need to assess:
- The stage of your current progress
- The season of your life
The stage of current progress in your immediate season is this:
How near or far are you from your desired goal?
Most think, I need to lose 30 pounds, I need to get more phone calls, or I need to make 3,000 more dollars per month from my blog, this is the wrong season assessment.
Here’s how to precisely assess your current season to create good time goals.
Stare the Reality of Your Current Season in the Face
What do you want to become or do, how much time did you spend on that activity last week?
Make sure this assessment does not involve “reading,” “thinking,” planning, or researching the activity!
Prayer and actions are the only two ways to bring change, and you can’t pray your way to become a barista or losing weight,
The correct assessment is in asking questions like these:
- Did I spend 2 hours, 8-hours, or 30 hours last week writing?
- Did I spend 8-hours last week exercising?
- Did I spend 1-hour or 50 hours last week brewing coffee?
- Or did you just “research” or think about it!?
Shoot yourself straight, an offness here can not adjust for success!
How many minutes last week did you spend writing, exercising, making coffee, brewing beer, or creating a board game?
That is the reality of your current season.
Here’s the next step.
Define the Season of Your Life
In winter, spring, summer, and fall, different activities and tasks are “have to’s” than the others.
After you get married, start a new job, have a kid, or begin school, things like these also involve “have to’s” that are outside of the control of your time.
The key to winning in self-discipline is assessing the current freedoms available to you to discipline yourself within to earn more freedom.
What is coming up in the next couple of months? What tasks, holidays, and activities are going to hinder your goal?
Pulse check:
Don’t look at the hectic world you’ve created for yourself because of your inability to say no to other people.
Look at the monumental have to’s only,
- a wedding,
- thanksgiving,
- starting college or a new job
- birth of a human,
- family reunion,
- or anniversary,
Not I have to help my cousin save his job because he sucks at managing his life too!
Let’s Stop for a Minute and Catch Up:
At this point, you have a glimpse of something substantial you want to accomplish in life, an identity.
You also realize how close or far away you are from that reality by looking at the time you spent in that activity last week.
And you have a decent pulse check on what the next couple of your months look like in life.
Now:
Determine the time buckets of activities and tasks that create your dreams instead of helping someone else accomplish theirs.
Here’s how
How to Plan this Week
What’s the magic formula?
Get this clear in your mind.
What goes on every day in a life that does the desire in your heart?
Artists paint, authors and bloggers write, healthy people fitness, etc.
Here’s how to craft your custom time management routine for this week in 3-steps
Write it down is step one.
Want to read more? Be an artist? Begin a side hustle to get out of your j.o.b.? Write a book?
This is your 6-months, one year, three years, or maybe a five-year dream.
An essential element to consider is this quote that blew me away from Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline.
“Our tendency is to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year and underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years.”
It’s obvious that these “I can be a published and famous author in one year” ideas stem from our microwave and credit card western thinking and are likely why we suck at managing time!
C.S. Lewis calls this the Law of Undulation and causes a headmaster demon Screwtape to pen these words,
“Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal… As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life — his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.”
This law of Undulation will undoubtedly rear its head and cause you to slide back to the cycle of consuming to rejuvenate enough to get through tomorrow.
Don’t let the demons win!
But I’m jumping ahead.
Step two to prioritize this week is to make a shortlist, 2-4 systems to knock out this quarter.
Make a Priority Systems List
What is the systems list?
A system is made up of habits, stages, and mundane tasks that are necessary to master accomplishing the identity you are seeking.
Here are three examples to show you how to prioritize a system that focuses on identity transformation.
- Becoming healthy (a.k.a. losing weight)
- Actualizing an artist dream
- Earning money from a blog
Becoming healthy
The systems necessary to become healthy are pretty straightforward, increase muscle through fitness, and improve eating healthy foods while avoiding crap.
Both require a focus on creating custom to your personality time management tips.
When and how are you going to exercise, and when are you going to meal prep?
The only measurable metric to dwell on are these two blocks of time systems: fitness and meal prep.
Not, did you lose the 4.27 lbs of weight to hit a goal 6-weeks from now?
A truly healthy person merely eats well and routinely exercises over a long period, and one day they wake up and realize, I look good and feel great, I’m healthy.
Actualizing an Artist’s Dream
Whether your art is writing songs, painting, or drawing: a professional artist has a platform to connect with potential customers and products to sell to fans.
This involves primarily two systems as well, marketing and what Seth Godin calls, shipping the work.
What do you need to ship?
- A songwriter finishes and publishes songs,
- a painter completes and places their work out for others to criticize or praise,
- a brewmaster creates new beers and puts beer out for people to try.
The time bucket systems for an artist to commit to this week are finishing art, shipping the work, and publishing like an internet marketer.
Earning money from a blog
Bloggers do two things, write words, and publish the words on the internet.
If you suck at writing, the effective time management tips are to become consistent in writing to improve while publishing your best blogging efforts weekly as you get better.
The two time systems to create are 1. writing times and 2. publishing times.
What are two to three systems you need to improve this week?
What’s step three?
Schedule me.
Just like you schedule and keep appointments with friends, family, and your doctor:
Put this on your schedule now.
What time frames in the next 7-days are you going to do the tasks and activities that result in that dream becoming a reality?
And stick to the appointment.
What if you miss the appointment? What if the effectiveness of the tasks is lacking?
You learn the hidden in plain sight, but the most overlooked time management tip for your life.
How to Never Flail in Time Management Again
Can you accomplish anything you dream up in your mind?
How?
You can leap tall buildings, have established faith, become Van Gough, Mozart, Mother Theresa, or the best mom on earth when you embody a whole life challenge mindset.
A whole life challenge involves consistent resets and forgets, grace for yourself while you continue to experiment, analyze, and adapt the successes and failures of managing your time each week.
How did you manage your time?
Answering questions like these each week are how to create custom time management tips for your personality.
- How many morning routines did you have?
- How effective were they?
- How much time did you write, fitness, or paint?
- Why not?
- How well did it go in that cycle of your current season in life Tuesdays?
View every week as new, a blank slate of opportunity to break the years of ingrained habits holding you back.
It took a lot of the wrong time management to form these habits,
- It will take significant time management over a long period before it becomes as natural as your current habits of checking out, passivity, and consumerism.
Reset and forget, starting new each week is how to turn your time management right side up in a little while.
Here are a few final time management tips to ensure your success.
Balancing Tasks, Work, and Relationships
Look.
You know this, but you often ignore it: You can’t accomplish every task for every bucket in your life that is on your plate.
What do you do?
You allocate your time for the next year to the 5-burners of your life.
What are the five life burners?
- Family
- Friends
- Physical Health
- Spiritual Health
- & Work
You can not have all of these five burners on high every moment of your life, but you often try.
We all do it.
In the next year you will be handed 8,760 hours of time, what are you going to do with it?
Pre-determine your life priorities by deciding which of these five buckets will get what percentage of your time in the next year.
When I lost my job and started side hustles, my priorities for activities and tasks for a couple of years was all work and almost no play.
Physical health got the least of my time; friends received the second-lowest, then family, spiritual, with work tasks receiving the most time.
Stick with me here.
Hopefully, after reading this post, your “work” is now turned into two buckets. One for your boss that currently pays your bills and two;
A side hustle dream to fire your boss and achieve goals for yourself.
You’re likely going to have to work for the man to pay your bills but,
What do you do for the rest of the day?
Your north star for the next year is the buckets of time split between your side hustle, physical and spiritual health, family, and friends.
What is it going to be?
If you pre-determine and divide 100-points between each bucket, does work receive 93% or 60%?
What about family, physical health, friends? What percentage of your time do they get in the next 12-months?
The only wrong answer is a no-answer! That will allow others to use your time for their benefit.
Don’t let them use you anymore.
Here are a few other tips to help you crush it.
Tasks and a Time Limit
This is a severe mental shift to make:
You probably have never stuck to embarking on a journey for yourself, telling yourself what you are going to do instead of someone else determining that for you.
Next week will go pretty decent because you are in a motivation time to make a change.
In another week or two, this feeling will fade.
What do you do?
Reminding you about the necessary weekly resets and forgets, before you begin each week determine a handful of task priorities you will accomplish next week.
Work side hustle tasks like,
- Experimenting with watercolor instead of charcoal
- Getting to work early and writing there before you clock in
- Experimenting with roasting coffee at a lower temperature and a longer duration
- Etc.
I plan these priority tasks each Thursday and Friday, and they become “sprints” for next week.
After sabbathing from Friday to Saturday, I wake up early on Sunday, uber motivated to begin these sprint tasks.
By choosing these specific tasks before next week, a new set of motivation births at the beginning of every week.
I know when these tasks will occur before the week begins and the time limit set to accomplish this week’s sprint.
And you know what?
One week at a time is how you will build the life you and God love.
By managing your time, you create the life you were meant to live instead of living for another man’s dream.
Make Your Biggest Dream a Reality
What have you wanted to do but is still on your bucket list instead of reality?
- Play the guitar?
- Write a book?
- Making money from a blog?
- Lose weight?
- Stick to a morning routine?
- Fire your boss and work from home?
Whether you want to bring peace in your home and your life or make the most money in the world, time management is the fundamental skill to pursue.
To make this end goal you desire become a reality; you must do the routines that suck before the favor of identity is realized each week.
Bringing the management and effectiveness of your successes: and forgetting, moving beyond the misses with a new best guess experiment to turn an off-target into an on target.