This year started with a reorganization of my office space and bedroom. Along with that, I reorganized my schedule to better allocate my time. Now time management is one of the toughest topics for most people. Yet, time is the great equalizer. Unlike money, we all have exactly the same amount of time. Day in and day out, we each get 24 hours to use.
I used to teach a course on time management in the days before Covid. Since the theme of this year seems to be reorganizing/restructuring your life, I thought I would do a quick series of blog posts on the process I use to create my schedule and manage my time. If you’re wondering why how I manage time even matters, you might not be that familiar with everything I do. I run Inklings Publishing, I run the Houston Writers Guild, I teach with Writers in the Schools, I run a real estate business, I am a writing coach and developmental editor for private clients, and I write my own books to publish. That’s on top of my personal life and family needs. To do all this successfully, I need to really control my time.
All that being said, here is the first step to managing your time effectively. The first thing you need to do is create a couple of lists:
- List the things you do every week that are set in stone — example: your job hours, choir practice, taking the kids to their piano lesson, etc
- List the things that you NEED to do but that don’t have a set time when they happen — grocery shopping, laundry, cooking, etc
- List the things you WANT to do but feel you never have time to fit into your schedule — read for pleasure, write the great American novel, crochet, etc
Once you have these items listed, you can begin to create your utopian itinerary. This is where you set up what your ideal week would look like. Obviously, no week will ever flow so perfectly, but by setting up what the best use of your time looks like you can take more control of it.
Start out by using notebook paper and laying out the days of the week hour by hour, as shown in the picture. Start with the hour at which you want to wake up.
So you itemize your itinerary layout by first plugging in for the week the items that are absolutely set in stone. These hours are not going to change and there’s no other use you can make of them. Here’s a picture of what that looks like for me. Note that the teaching sessions as well as my podcast session are set plus my critique groups and shuffleboard times. These don’t change. So they go in first.
Next, you plug in must dos. It’s important to consider things like housework and such because these small but crucial pieces of life can easily derail you and cause stress if you don’t know when and how they will fit into your schedule. Some of these things occur weekly, but for me some are monthly, or bi-monthly — like cooking. Also, somethings happen while you are doing other things — like laundry loads which can be done simultaneously to other things.
Now, you have the spaces where time is yours to allot. This is where you plug in the sessions of things you really want to do. Once you have that on your paper, you can put it cleanly together on a big page so it is all available at a glance. So, here’s what the final itinerary looks like for me.
Once you have worked out this utopian use of your time, weekly and monthly, you can begin to implement it on an ongoing basis. Tune in to my next blog post where I will share how I use this schedule to formulate my ongoing time use. Until then, try making one of these ideal schedules for yourself. Here’s a picture of a blank planner page if you want to use this one.
