Time Management: Tips To Reclaim Your Time in the 21st Century

Reclaim Your Time!

It is 2018! Between our phones, social life, studies, and careers, it gets a bit taxing to manage your time. With issues like double booking and showing up late to events throughout the day, the problem of time management may be taking a toll on our lives. In the world of freelance work, this problem can be even bigger for individuals who are tasked with scheduling all of their activities on their own. It would not be much of a surprise to hear about a Massage Therapist who packed a cast iron pot of spaghetti in their car on the way to an appointment while their massage table idly burns on the stove. So what can we do? As professionals and just living human being in the 21st century, what steps can we take to organize our lives and manage our time. Well, in the wise words of Maxine Waters, we should certainly reclaim our time! It is important to take control of your own schedule and be able to utilize to benefit yourself in the best ways possible.

Prioritize

You may not realize this yet, but some situations or tasks are more urgent than others. For instance, let’s say you have a client that needs to be seen on Tuesday at 2pm and you would also like to maybe get a haircut at 2pm on that same Tuesday. It seems like you are hopeless because both events occur at the same time, but we can deduce that a haircut can be rescheduled at anytime. Ensuring that a client is receiving the care that they need and will leave satisfied with your services is more of a priority than getting a haircut. We can decide what goes higher on our priority list when we take a look at their urgency. To take a look at how important a task is, we can measure how important it actually is by weighing in the consequences or the aftermath. Let's say, instead of taking care of that client at 2pm on Tuesday, you decided to go ahead and get that lovely haircut of yours. Although you have a nice new hair-do to show off to your pals, you now have a client who is disappointed for not receiving services they were promised. That can lead to that client giving you bad reviews and thus lowering your profits and success. With all this said, it is clear that arriving to assist your client at 2pm is a higher priority than getting a haircut. It is always important to keep this mental organization in mind in order to ensure that we are placing our energy in the right places at the right time. Prioritizing can go a long way in ensuring that your schedule is efficient and solving all the tasks that need to be solved productively.

Saying No, Does Not Make You Evil

Often times, in order to prioritize, we have to turn down offers that are counterproductive to our goals. If one has to pass their MBLEX test, they probably shouldn’t spend their week going out partying instead of studying. It is imperative to muster up the confidence and self-control that will let you be able to turn down tempting offers that steer you off track. This is not to say that as career-driven individuals, we should not have fun, but it is important to know when to have fun and when to take some time off. In fact, when we do say “no” enough times to those fun events, when we actually have the time allotted for those activities, they will hold much more value since you get to enjoy them with the knowledge that work is your priority. You may be thinking, “how do I say no?”. Well, it’s simple. Just say it! It may seem harsh, but in reality, friends and acquaintances understand that work and careers should always come first. You can always add an explanation instead of just simply stating “no”. Something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, no I can’t make it. I have to get ready for a client”. Their truly are endless ways you can deny an offer to go out so it is up to you to creatively place your words in order to secure the stability in your future.

You Can Still Have Fun

While we prioritize and turn down unimportant activities, it is good to remember one last important step in managing time in the 21st century. That step is to have fun with it! As cheesy as it is, it is known that we enjoy activities much more when we are having fun. Work doesn’t have to be as tedious as we make it out to be. It’s okay to smile and laugh while we get the job done. That way, you won’t hesitate to continuously prioritize tasks since it won’t be dreadful after your decision to work positively. There’s no shame in being happy at work, in fact, work environments that are known to be more positive correlate directly with greater success rates.

Success Is Our Destination and Time Is Our Vessel

Here are just a few tips to start managing your time in the 21st century. It is a cluttered world out there and it is our job as a career-driven community to create a stable work environment. If you ever manage to forget some of these tips and tricks just remember that in lieu of it all, it is important to always remember to reclaim your time! It is time to realize that we are not going to have careers and opportunities handed to us every day of our lives so it is time to buckle down and take control of our own path. Success is our destination and time is our vessel. We can only find success, when we take the reigns of all the factors that determine it.