5 Tips to Manage Your Time (and Your Life)

February 15, 2021

As you might have noticed, I've been a little (or should we say a lot) less regular lately with posting. To be more precise, it's been almost exactly six months since my last post (What Is Femininity?) and it would be an understatement to say a lot has changed. ln the past six months, I have:

applied to 30+ full-time positions in a recession,
spent 2 weeks in isolation because of a COVID scare,
wrapped up my final semester of college,
accepted a job offer with a nonprofit that trains and places teachers, and
moved to a new city for a spring internship through my university.

And those are the big things. But there have been a lot of little ones too, a lot of friends made, sights seen, and experiences had. It's been a very busy six months, and all that busy-ness has given me a lot of time to think about what it means to really manage my time. So today I'd like to share five tips.

1. Learn to say no.

This has probably been one of the biggest things I've had to learn since starting my college career. Boundaries are important with everything, and that's especially true when it comes to our time. Time is a resource and we have a limited amount to use each day. Learning to say "no" to other people is absolutely crucial, whether it's a social event or a responsibility someone's dumping on you that you know you can't handle. In my college leadership organization, I learned it's best to be transparent about what's going on in my life and how overwhelmed I am. If my team leader knows I already have a lot on my plate, they're more understanding when I let them know a particular obligation is too much.

It's also important to learn to say "no" to yourself. I'm the kind of gal to find all kinds of random volunteer opportunities and trainings that I want to apply for. I create plans to achieve all kinds of new goals. I've had to learn that I really can't do it all, and that's okay. If you struggle with this, get an accountability partner. Have someone in your corner who can tell you when you're trying to take on too much and believe them when they tell you to chill out.

2. Identify your priorities.

I recommend sitting down at the beginning of each week, month, and year to determine what matters in your life. At the beginning of my college career, I decided my grades would be my absolute number one priority and because I set that precedent, I was able to pursue high academic standards. Now here is where it's important to recognize the distinction between commitment and involvement. There's a saying my dad shared with me a year or so ago that goes like this:

"The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed." — Martina Navratilova (Czechoslovak-born American former professional tennis player and coach)

Choose to be committed to the things that matter. Decide that they matter 100% of the time and throw everything you have into them. And remember that when you're committed to something bit, you are not going to have as much energy left for the things you are not committed to. That's okay.

It's also important to recognize that just because something is lower on your list (an involvement instead of a commitment) doesn't mean it's not important. Sometimes we have a lot of different goals going on at once, and that's completely okay. However, a big part of time management is being realistic with ourselves. Sure, I can tell myself all the things I do are of equal weight, but there's no way I can pour 100% of myself into all of them all at once. You might think telling yourself you can do it all will make you do it all, but that hasn't been my experience. Normally when I tell myself that every sphere of my life matters equally, I start to prioritize the things that don't matter over the things that do and make myself feel really bad for not prioritizing the ones that don't.

My recommendation is that you sit down and create a list of all the things going on in your life. Now write a 1 next to the ones that matter the most (commitments; I wouldn't pick more than 2). Then a 2 next to the ones that matter a lot, but you're willing to let them slide sometimes (involvements). Finally, put a 3 next to the things you enjoy that are not really your priority (these are your interests). When you create your list, give yourself some grace. If it's on your list, it matters. The trick is figuring out what matters most. And remember, it's just a list. You can always rearrange it.

3. Determine your non-negotiables.

So you've set your priorities. You know what matters most, but now you have to organize your life to match. The way I go about this is by setting certain small tasks that will help me achieve my goals. You've probably heard that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (Lao Tzu), and achieving your dreams begins the same way.

A good way to approach this is by drafting SMART Goals. "SMART" is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. When you establish tasks, you want them to adhere to these five specifications. As an example, let's take my personal project of writing a novel. A SMART goal I set for myself last year was to write 1,000 words per day, five days a week so I'd have a 70,000 word-draft by January. We can test it against the SMART framework:

Specific: The goal is specific because it states exactly what I needed to do and how often I needed to do it.
Measurable: I could measure each day whether or not I wrote 1,000 words and I could track my progress towards my 70,000-word goal.
Attainable: Depending on how easily the writing came, 1,000 words could take me between a half-hour and an hour to write. This was a reasonable amount of time to set aside for writing.
Relevant: Writing each day was relevant to my overall goal of completing a novel.
Timely: I had a clear deadline by which I wanted to accomplish my goal (January) and I used that deadline to determine how much I needed to write each day.

Once you've established a task (or tasks) that will help you make progress on your personal project, it's important to set aside some time and treat it as a non-negotiable. This is one of the most important parts of the entire goal-setting process, but it ultimately rests on personal willpower. Setting something as a non-negotiable means you don't let yourself make excuses. For writing, that meant no matter what, I accomplished my writing goals each day. Some days, that might have meant staying up late or cutting into relaxation time.

You can apply this to any kind of task, or even habits. If you're trying to create a better night hygiene routine, wash your face every night, or brush your teeth twice a day, treat those things like non-negotiables. Tell yourself no matter what happens, you will take care of those things before moving onto your next task.

4. Use a calendar.

This is where we get into the nitty-gritty physical "management" of time. The best way to manage your time is to know how much you have and how it's already distributed. At the beginning of each school semester, I would input my entire class schedule into a calendar. From there, I layered extracurriculars, my part-time job, and any habits/tasks I was trying to accomplish on a daily or weekly basis (such as the writing goal I mentioned above).

This isn't super complicated, but in order for it to be effective, you have to be consistent with it. As soon as I learn about an upcoming obligation, I immediately input it into my Google Calendar. While I'm no longer a college student, I still do this to manage my time today. I set reminders for myself and block out time for important assignments. Without a calendar, it's really hard to plan ahead, and when you aren't planning ahead, then everything you do is a reaction. We want to be more than just reactors. We want to own our time, and the way to do it is with a little extra effort and forethought.

5. Use to-do lists.

We started with the broadest time-management advice and we've been slowly zooming in. We went from controlling where we pour our energy to creating goals to planning those goals out on a weekly or monthly basis. To-do lists are for daily planning, so this is about as zoomed in as we're going to go.

I've gone back-and-forth with to-do lists. Sometimes I use them religiously and other times, I drop the ball and just go off Google Calendar. But back to reacting vs. acting, to-do lists are another key way to ensure we are not just reacting to our responsibilities. We want to manage our time, not have it manage us.

I've used a few different apps for this, from Apple's Reminders app to MinimaList to Google Keep. Google Keep is what I've been using lately and it's by far my favorite. I have several different lists on there, and my favorite part is that it gives you the opportunity to "pin" certain lists to the top of the screen so you don't have to scroll to find them. I have a to-do list for each day of the week, certain organizations I'm in, and then a shopping list that I regularly update throughout the week.

At the end of the day though, different people have different preferences. Maybe a bullet journal works for you, or your phone's Notes app, or an Expo board you keep above your desk. How you keep track doesn't matter. All that matters is that it works. If you've been keeping a to-do list and still somehow keep forgetting to do things, then maybe it's time to switch up the medium.

I hope these tips are helpful to you and that they help you get organized for this coming year. Comment below some of the things you want to accomplish by managing your time.

Stay organized and, as always, stay lavender ladies!

— Theresa