You’re getting ready for bed and as you wind down from your hectic day, you remember the dry cleaning you forgot to pick up that you need for tomorrow, which reminds you that you still haven’t bought the plane tickets to visit your parents, which leads to the card you got your mother for Mother’s Day that still hasn’t been mailed… the list goes on. How is it – in this digital age when you can check emails on your phone and set alarms with electronic reminders – how is it we still don’t have enough time for everything?
The Curse of Convenience
While using digital media can improve our ability to organize our lives, it doesn’t add hours to the day. Every minute you take to enter information into your iPhone calendar or set a tickler on your daily to-do list is another minute lost. This doesn’t mean that technology is bad; it just means you have to make time for your time management, and that’s hard to do when you’re already overwhelmed.
Life Happens
Time management as a concept is a trap, a dead end. Working to organize and optimize every moment of your day doesn’t account for random events that require triage treatment, like a flat tire or rain when the forecast said sunny or a car accident at an unavoidable intersection. In these instances, you must rely on your natural problem-solving skills to take care of the task at hand before moving on. If you’re hopelessly without the ability to prioritize successfully like Calvin, an Irish freelance writer, then you may want to look at ways to improve your habits and general life management.
Rethink Your Approach
Don’t bother buying a self-help book on time management. The writers at Lifehack suggest we stop thinking about time management as how we organize everything and instead, see it as how we use our time to accomplish what we need to accomplish. What are your priorities? What do you already accomplish without stressing out about it? There is a reason why you always make it to the gym by 7am weekdays but can’t make it to the post office before noon on Saturday. How do you already decide what you will accomplish, what you want to accomplish, and what you might accomplish in any given day?
Know When To Ask For Help
After you have figured out how it is you approach your day, it is time to change bad habits. You have to figure out how to make the most of your days in accordance to what your personal priorities are and what you can live with missing out on. While you will still need to accomplish those things that fall off the bottom of your daily list, you now know what those things are, definitively, and can ask for help. Let go of those things you can pass on to someone else who is capable and willing to do them for you. Time management is still dead, but you can manage your desire to control everything and let go just enough to get more accomplished each day than you ever imagined possible.
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