Keeping track of time gives you more of it for the things you enjoy

Keeping track of time gives you more of it for the things you enjoy
                        
Although the snow insisted on falling further into the New Year than usual, the green grass has valiantly started to trumpet the arrival of spring. Now what? How do you intend to spend your precious time this spring and in the summer to follow? It’s great to think of long leisurely summer days with no plans or to do lists, but does that really happen? Before we know it, baseball schedules and constantly growing grass start filling up our days. We blink twice and it is time to start school shopping. So, how do we make this year different? How do we get a hold on our time so that we can spend it doing the things that we envision? Try starting with a list and a log. List the things that you want to include in this warmer season. Perhaps you want to have more cookouts (That one is on my list.) How about a vacation? More time at the lake fishing, waterskiing, or kayaking? What about more time biking or simply sitting on the deck enjoying the sunshine? Do you know how much time you spent on those activities last year? That’s one of the ways that keeping a log comes in handy. You can start to see how much time you are putting into the things that you really want to spend time on. The other way to use the log is to identify where your time wasters or time leaks occur. or a set amount of time, whatever you feel comfortable with, jot down what you are doing during your day. Either list activities with an amount of time beside or list blocks of time followed by what you did. What things could you have given up if it meant being able to spend time where you really wanted? What about distractions? I once took a course, based on office work, which encouraged us to calculate our distraction factor. Distractions can be phone calls, visitors, screaming children, email and lots of other things. We started by considering how long we thought a task should take. Then, we did the task in our work environment and tracked how long it took. If we expected a job to take 30 minutes, but it actually took 60 because of distractions, we had a distraction multiplier of two. I tried this method when I started staying home with my kids. Because little kids can be a bit hard to predict, I had to settle for a wide margin, but the multiplier still worked. It helped to eliminate a lot of stress over how long it took to get things done and gave me a more realistic view of what was possible in a day. When you consider distractions, keep in mind things that simply slow your productivity. Television can be one. Although we may work while it is on, it often draws our eyes and attention. Try this. Do a task that you normally do with the television on. Then, do it a couple of times without the television. Compare the times. If you want entertainment while doing boring or repetitive tasks, try listening to audiobooks. You won’t be drawn away by a screen. What about situations that require mental concentration? If you aren’t accustomed to working in silence, try working your way into it with quiet, instrumental music. Now, we can think about the fun side of the time log. Use it to make sure you are getting that dreamed of time on the porch swing sipping iced tea. Purposely including those things will get your springtime hours where to want them. Although tracking time may at first seem tedious, doing so can prove very freeing. And give you more time for cookouts.


Loading next article...

End of content

No more pages to load