Welcome everyone. I'm Kim Christiansen and this is the Peaceful Productivity Podcast where I share strategies to help you get the most out of your time and feel better in the process.
Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Peaceful Productivity Podcast. I'm really happy that you're here with me. I'm your host, Kim Christiansen. And today we're going to talk about time management, specifically, my favorite time management technique. When it comes to productivity, staying organized and managing your time effectively ,this is the foundation of a peaceful state of mind. Today I'm going to share my favorite technique with you that helps me to get organized and stay in control of my schedule. The reason that I like this particular technique is for four reasons. First, it helps me to avoid over committing.
Second, it gives me a visual representation of my schedule. Third, it helps me to stay accountable to myself. And fourth, the last reason is that it helps me to reduce decision fatigue. You can call this technique scheduling, or you may call it calendaring. It is simply transferring your task list items, those most important items from your task list into your calendar. This technique requires me to get really concrete about the task.
It requires me to think about when I want to do the task, how long I think the task will take, and what do I want to accomplish during the timeframe I have set for myself. Once I've answered these questions for myself, then it just becomes a matter of scheduling these tasks into my calendar. The beauty of this technique is that it is very simple. And it solves a couple of challenges that I routinely run into. The first challenge is that I can regularly overestimate how much I can accomplish in a day. A lot of us do this when eight hours stretches out in front of us, it can feel endless.
However, when we want to start to slot things in like lunch breaks, commute time, meetings, appointments, and prep time that can leave considerably less time to tackle the priority list. A great exercise to start with is to start slotting these things into the calendar to give yourself a better picture of how much time is available for your priority list items. When you have a clearer picture of what time is actually available to you, this can help you to feel much more in control of your schedule.
It puts you in a position of power to make clear intentional decisions about your time and what you want to do with your day. The next challenge that this calendaring technique helps with is having too many things in too many different places. When there's a task list and a calendar and maybe multiple calendars, and then there's notes in a variety of different places, this can really contribute to the feeling of overwhelm.
Having everything in your calendar gives you one clear picture of what to expect for the day. There's no guesswork. And even more importantly, you get to eliminate that negative nagging feeling of forgetting something. Have you ever experienced that you're going through your day and you keep finding yourself searching your memory for what comes next? Or maybe there's just an overall sense of dread or weightiness or a feeling of anxiety. Having a single source of truth that you can refer back to can be very reassuring. For someone like me who is very visual, this can also be very comforting to have a quick snapshot just at a glance of what to expect for the day.
The next challenge that calendaring helps to solve is staying accountable to yourself. When you define your top three priorities in the morning, and then don't create a concrete plan on when you're going to do them, then they don't stay your top three priorities for very long. They sort of become glimmery mirages of things that you'd like to do, if there's time or maybe when you get around to them. And we know that more often than not, we never get around to them. So then at the end of the day, you look back at your three or more unfinished priorities for the day.
And then you start to entertain thoughts of how you never seem to get done what you want to do or how you're inefficient or how you need to get organized. You may even slip into this mindset of believing that you're just a disorganized person or that you're not good at planning.
What I found is that the road to accountability is paved with self trust. And the best way to start trusting yourself more when it comes to time management is to set yourself up for success by putting your priorities into your calendar. Carve out space for yourself to actually get those important things done. The best way to turn your intention into commitment is to actually schedule some time for yourself. This is the foundation of an accountability habit. Start small, experience some wins, and then you can build from there.
Using your calendar as your cue to remember to take action and then building the belief that you are the type of person who keeps their commitments to themselves. The final challenge that calendaring helps to solve is decision fatigue. When you go through your day constantly asking yourself, what is next? It can be very draining. This is because making decisions is very mentally taxing. It requires a great deal of mental energy.
If you're requiring yourself to stay in a constant state of decision making, it takes away from your mental capacity to spend on other, maybe more important tasks. And it taps into these mental reserves. It also puts you in the position of making decisions when your energy reserves are low. We know that the quality of our decisions declines as our energy declines.
So when you don't have a concrete plan for how to execute on your important items, not only are you training your mental reserves, the quality of your decisions is diminishing as the day progresses. This is why it can feel so much easier to make healthy choices at breakfast time when you're feeling refreshed and make such poor choices at dinner time when you're feeling drained. Calendaring your priorities helps you to protect your mental energy right throughout the day, particularly when your scheduling breaks into your day as well.
Calendaring allows you to get the important stuff done as well as to protect and refresh your energy. If you want to give this technique a try, I recommend starting small. Start with just today. Schedule all of your previous commitments such as meetings, appointments, commute time. If they're not already there, put those into your calendar. Next, schedule your breaks. Then add your top three priorities to your calendar. A word of warning, don't try to get it perfect. Treat it like an experiment to find out what works best for you.
Everyone has different tolerance levels for the amount of structure and the amount of flexibility that they enjoy during the day. So this is a great experiment to find those tolerance levels for yourself. Something that can also be very helpful is to consider how you will handle unexpected deviations from your calendar. This method isn't so much about preventing the unexpected as it is more about giving yourself the bandwidth and mental energy to deal with the unexpected in a way that feels good for you instead of just reacting in the moment.
When we get interrupted or when things don't go according to schedule, we might be tempted to abandon the whole plan. So you can ask yourself in advance, how will you handle this temptation? When you consider it in advance, you have the access to, your more deliberate and thoughtful areas of your brain instead of simply reacting based on an emotional reaction. If you need any help putting this together or putting it into action, I'll invite you to experience a free coaching session.
You can find the link on my website, FinancialWellnessCoach.ca. In coaching, I can help you to access your own inner wisdom to find the approach that works best for you. Take care everyone, wishing you much peaceful productivity this week. Are you looking for a coach who will help you increase your business profit while protecting your time and your well-being? If so, I'll invite you to check out my website, FinancialWellnessCoach.ca.