If one of your New Year’s resolutions involves spending more time with your family, you’re not alone. Each year around the holidays, polls conducted consistently show that many of us vow to appreciate loved ones and spend more time with family and friends in the coming year. The good news is that with advice from time management experts and some personal motivation, it’s not as difficult as you may imagine.
Keys to successful time management
Although responsibilities and commitments vary, everyone works with the same 24 hours each day. Rather than running out of the gate each day like a racehorse, make your plan, work your plan and pace yourself, experts say. To accomplish this way of living - efficiently and effectively - you need to take time to plan.
Most time management experts offer many of the same suggestions, but build their advice around different models. The suggestions typically include determining priorities, making lists, maintaining calendars and setting goals.
Here are a few of the practices I’ve found most helpful from a variety of authors and professional organizers. Browse through these ideas and consult books and websites to discern which style best matches your current situation. Sometimes, it’s a combination of strategies that you will find works best for you and your family.
1. Determine priorities. Organizing from the Inside Out, by Julie Morgenstern (2004, Henry Holt and Company). What I like best about Morgenstern’s famous work is that she counsels people to first, reflect on their unique personalities and situations; and second, to tackle organization and time management. Sometimes as busy parents, we need to take it one day at a time, hour by hour or even minute by minute on more challenging days. Yet most parents learn having a routine is good for their family life.
One of the biggest causes of a scattered schedule is not being sure of your goals and priorities, says Morgenstern. If one of your priorities is to spend more time with your family on weeknights, for example, you may reconsider a volunteer request or another sports activity for your child.
Morgenstern’s strategy for time management involves scheduling core activities that enables you to accomplish your goals and to set your priorities. Some typical areas for a married working mother to add on her calendar include time for self, family, work, relationships, finances and community.
Morgenstern recommends creating a “time map,” beginning when you wake and ending when you go to sleep. Typically created hour-by-hour, this kind of schedule allots specific spaces in your day for tending to those core areas. It serves as a foundation from which to work; it forces you to keep your life in balance; and gives you time to accomplish your goals.
2. Make lists. Make Every Second Count: Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success and Less Stress, by Robert W. Bly (2010, Career Press). Bly is a strong advocate for making lists. He credits his productivity to a series of lists he keeps on his computer. If you’re like me, preferring to write lists in a notebook or as part of your planner, that works too. Bly maintains his most critical lists are daily to-dos, and current and long-term projects. He types his daily to-do lists and then posts on his wall the list of activities that he wants to accomplish. From that, he creates an hour-by-hour schedule. He revises his list daily. Bly’s current list of projects includes the deadlines, and he also uses this to plan his daily to-dos. He updates this list several times a week.
Bly checks out his long-term projects about once a week. He usually puts in a few hours each week on one of the schemes that interests him. These aren’t urgent but help him reach his goals.
3. Keep a calendar. Confessions of an Organized Homemaker, by Deniece Schofield (1994, Betterway Publications). This is a classic source. Schofield was writing about organization long before it became an industry. Schofield offers a common-sense approach to time management. Her advice is simple and doesn’t require a lot of money for ineffective products.
She’s a proponent of keeping a calendar. The easiest way to organize your time is with your paper, online or phone planner. Choose the system that works best for you. The most important action is to use your system every day. For your personal calendar, use pages that give you plenty of space to write, including monthly and daily sections. Add in personalized sections, such as items you need to purchase, birthdays, dinner menus and books you want to read. Always take your planner with you so you can add in important dates and reminders as they come up.
Along with keeping a personal calendar, Schofield advises using a family calendar, one that is large and hung in a central location at your home. To keep the entire family well-coordinated, mark down music lessons, game times, business trips and other activities that affect family members.
4. Set goals. Wishcraft: How To Get What You Really Want, by Barbara Sher (2009, Radom House Inc). First self-published in 1979, Wishcraft is considered a classic in self-help manuals. Similar to Schofield, Sher advocates always planning for tomorrow. By taking that action, you can focus on the actions needed to be taken for the next day and ensure you’re prepared for it.
Sher is most encouraging about considering your “larger-than-life plan”. Don’t give up on your big dreams. It’s never too late to start. Put the next five years into a real time frame that you can see.
Of course, you don’t know what will happen in reality, “but all of the forces that will be operating on your life over those years - chance and love and loss and luck, health and economics and history - your wish and will, your own unfolding, should be one of the strongest. And it can be,” Sher writes. Keep a simple sketch of the next five years on your “planning wall”. (Do you have a planning wall? It’s one of my goals for the New Year. On it, you can include your personal flow chart of daily activities, weekly calendar, the next five years and so on.)
Writing your daily goals can give you that extra nudge to meet your deadlines because your long-range goals will remind you of all the adventures waiting for you - in the next year and beyond.
Kim enjoys reading and writing about organization and time management techniques that have worked well for her family.
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