Personal time management
Get the most out of life

It can be difficult being effective at personal time management. A common difficulty is the increase in the amount of time people are spending doing their job from their home. When work comes home it often becomes more difficult to separate home time from work time. Work time can easily start creeping into personal time.

In order to prevent burnout and improve your time management keeping your family happy and healthy, it is important to implement some techniques that will help you make better use of your time.

Exploring Your Options

An excellent first step to achieving effective time management is to look closely at your schedule. If you don't currently actively manage your schedule then it's time to take a look.

Schedule management is a pretty simple thing to do once you get organized. After all you just need to sit down once a day and work through the activities you have for that day. Although this sounds simple, for most of us it proves pretty difficult.

To tame your schedule and get your personal time management in order try following the following 5 step plan:

1. Electronic or Paper

Electronic schedules provide a great means to color code your appointments, reschedule them and automatically invite others by email. However in terms of personal time management they aren't always the best solution since they can be difficult to take with you. Even if you replicate the data on your computer with your phone or electronic organizer it can prove difficult to keep everything up to date

Unlike electronic schedules paper based schedules are normally easy to take with you. This makes them very effective when someone you're meeting with wants to set up a further meeting. Paper schedules can however get pretty messy if you chop and change your meetings a lot.

Often I find that people have a particular preference and couldn't think about changing. Personally I find that an electronic one works best but I think that if you don't have a lot of meetings then a paper based system is fine.

If you'd like some more ideas on what to pick then have a look at daily planner which explains the benefits of each system.

2. Consistent TIme

Whether you have a paper based system or an electronic system you need to decide on a convenient time to work with your schedule. Once you get over the initial set up it should need no more than 10 to 30 mins a day.

Generally people find that the best time to work on their schedule is at the start or the end of each day. For me to be effective in my personal time management the start of the day is a must. I like to know that I'll have few interruptions and can concentrate easily.

3. Initial Set Up

To make a schedule work effectively you need to take a bit of time to set things up so that they'll run smoothly. If you have a lot of meetings then picking a color coding system can be helpful. Use one color for family events, another for project meetings and another for general meetings and so on.

Decide whether you're going to have a schedule for work and one for home. Although not the ideal way to run things I know that in many cases work schedules are shared. If you do have two schedules then review them at the same time.

Now gather together on a list all of the events, appointments and anniversaries that you can think of. Next put them into your schedule. Keep the title short and I strongly suggest that anything over 2 months away you should only put in if it's something like a birthday. Keep the rest on a list that'll you'll be reviewing and updating daily.

4. Create Task List

Strictly speaking this isn't related to the schedule but it is related to personal time management. If you use an electronic system it's highly likely there will be an electronic task list. If you use a paper system, I suspect you'll already have a list of things to do in some paper form.

It's important to work on creating a task list so that you have a place to put things that you want to schedule in that aren't really appointments. You need to keep appointments and things to do separate.

Gather together all the tasks you know of and write them down on one big list. Next take that list and pick out the top 20 tasks. These task will form your initial to do (or task) list. Put the top 20 tasks onto a separate list.

I've included a free task list form to help you get started. This is in PDF format so you can save the form to use multiple times. You can click on the link task list or if you'd prefer to continue reading click on the link in the side menu.

It's called "Task list" and is under the Personal button. It'll open in a separate tab or window depending on your browser set up.

If you'd like to find out about a more comprehensive task list system then why not have a read of these personal time management tips.

5. Monitor, Update and Review

Now you're ready for running your schedule. You should have a schedule (electronic or paper) populated with a list of events, appointments and anniversaries. You should also have task list with your top 20 items on it.

Sit down once a day to review your schedule. At the review you need to focus on managing two things. First, go through your known appointments for the next two months. If there are new one or things to move about make the changes.

If you've new appointments that aren't in the next two months add them to the list you set up earlier. Review this list for appointments to add at your daily update.

Secondly review your task list. If you have new tasks add them to the big list. If you've completed tasks score them off the big list. Next review the big list for your top 20 items and update the top 20 items list accordingly.

Repeat this every day. It should be really quick after a while. You should also start to feel like you're making progress. You'll see the old appointments that have been completed and the tasks that you've gone through. You can easily see the work you've been getting through.

One last thing to consider with your schedule management is review and tidy up. Depending on how big your lists of appointment and tasks become you should redo the list perhaps once per month.

Of course, schedules are the answer to all time management problems. There are loads of other areas that you can tackle to become effective at personal time management. I'll add some more on personal time management over the coming months but in the meantime why not have a look around at the other great ideas for time management in the site.