Six Ways to Make the Most of Your Time
As a rule, your environment is extremely demanding. What’s more, there are so many demands on you that, due to the fact that you have to carry out endless tasks every day, making the most of your time tends to be a luxury. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.
You often try to perform an unlimited number of tasks that require a lot of time. In addition, many of them occupy a large part of your day. In this article, we invite you to analyze how you organize your time and to realize the number of tasks that you’re able to do throughout the day.
Making the most of your time can be complex
Even the most organized of us find it difficult to make the most of our time. If we subtract from the 24 hours in a day an average of between six-eight hours of sleep, we’re left with 16 – 18 hours. If we add to this the hours of work or academic classes, personal rest, meals, etc., we’re probably left with about six-eight ‘free’ hours.
Some of these hours can be considered ‘dead time’. In other words, times that you can’t really take advantage of. In fact, if you have to work in a group or must carry out a job with other people, these six-eight hours would probably end up as a minus figure.
Meeting deadlines
When at work or studying, you often have to meet deadlines. This requirement doesn’t account for your limits as a human being. Indeed, carrying out academic and work projects are costly in terms of time and often, no matter how much time you dedicate to them, they require more than you possess.
This sometimes generates feelings of frustration and hopelessness. In fact, on many occasions, you tend to blame yourself for not being able to make the most of your time. Furthermore, it’s often not even your responsibility. After all, nobody told you that making the most of your time was an obligation in a productive sense.
Procrastination and unforeseen events
Procrastination is characterized by the postponement of important activities in favor of others of lesser importance. It means that you relegate certain important activities as a way of delaying the inconveniences that they cause, not to mention the fear associated with putting all your resources to work in order to solve complex tasks.
To this, can be added the unexpected chores that arise throughout the day. These types of tasks can lead to delays when you’re trying to plan the time you have available for carrying out other activities that you consider to be important. However, it’s important to maintain a certain degree of flexibility and be aware that not all tasks need to be completed on the same day, nor that all planned tasks can even be done on a single day.
Six ways to make the most of your time
If you’re aware that you’re delaying certain important activities and that unforeseen events often occur throughout the day, here are some tips to help you make the best use of your time.
Planning
- Rest schedules. These involve your hours of sleep and the times at which you usually wake up in the morning. Planning your sleep schedules and mealtimes can give you more time to carry out activities that you consider to be important.
- Agenda. Making the best use of your time means planning and dividing your complex activities up into days. For instance, sometimes, you want to carry out a number of activities in a single day and, if you don’t, you feel bad. Therefore, you should allow yourself a space where you can do some of the more complex activities a little at a time, breaking them down into small steps.
Organization
- Segmentation. Many of your complex tasks should be segmented or divided into small steps. In some cases, when you’re faced with complex chores, making use of your time becomes extremely difficult when you don’t even know where to start. Consequently, dividing them up into smaller sections is especially important.
- Aims. While you eat breakfast, you can make an outline of the tasks you want to complete during the day and schedule them. Your ultimate goal is to find a balance between what you want to do and what you’d like to do. At the end of the day, you can review this scheme and analyze your feelings. Here, you could make a point of noting how you managed those tasks that appeared unexpectedly.
Estimation of achievements and time
- Don’t get dragged down. There are times when you get entangled in some tedious task that never seems to end and is extremely arduous, to the extent that you end up spending all your time and energy on it. Therefore, make sure you give yourself a time limit for each task. For example, if you want to read a 400-page book, it’ll be really difficult to read it in a single day, so you could try reading an average of between ten to 15 pages per day.
- ‘Little big achievements’. You can start with less complex tasks so that you’ll at least feel the satisfaction of having completed some by the end of the day. Also, if you use task segmentation, the more complex ones will gradually become easier to deal with.
There are many options you can use to make the most of your time. However, on many occasions, it’ll be the calendar itself that sets dates. These strategies aren’t only limited to the academic and work level, but also to your daily life and routines. By using them, you won’t fall into the trap of feeling fed up and despondent, thinking that you’re wasting time.