I would like to know how you manage your time so well?!

Where does the time go? That’s a question I am always asking myself it seems. Without a clear list of priorities and some planning, it is easy to get to the end of the day or week with not much to show for it except a growing pile of things that need to be done. Over the years, I’ve developed a number of approaches to managing my time that work for me. I hope that you might find some of them useful, too. 1) Set priorities for the day or week, as well as longer term goals for the month, semester, or year. These include several things: a. What do you HAVE to get done? These are the things that have deadlines and that are important in one way or another. This probably includes homework, chores around the house and that sort of thing. (There may be some things that have a deadline but that you can choose to ignore. For example, do you really have to fill out that survey about the restaurant you ate in last night?) b. What things are IMPORTANT to you? This may include things like exercising, sleeping, having dinner with your family, keeping in touch with friends. c. What things are coming up that require work in advance? This probably includes things like semester projects, longer papers, preparing for the SAT, college applications and the like. Once you have identified all of these things, you can make a list of them and develop schedule for yourself – roughly how much time you need to spend on each thing. This probably shouldn’t be an exact schedule, but it should give you a rough idea of how much time you have to spend on each thing. You should also break down the goals so that you know what you want to accomplish each day. That way, you can have little victories along the way as you accomplish the smaller goals, and you can also see that you are that much closer to getting to the overall goal. 2) Discipline yourself to work on one thing at a time. The experts are proving what many of us have known for a long time… multitasking does not work! When you are working on a task, do NOT take breaks to text, check your email or social media, or see what’s on TV. And don’t try to work on two things on your list at the same time. It takes longer in the end than if you finished one thing before moving on to the next. That said, DO take a short break every now and then to stretch your legs, get a drink of water, connect with your friends (briefly) and generally relax. 3) Review your progress against your priorities and goals in #1. Do this daily, as well as weekly and at the end of longer periods (monthly, end of semester, or whatever). Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t met your goals. Instead, try to understand why you didn’t meet them. Did you underestimate how long a particular homework set or project would take? Did you spend too much time doing things that were not on your list of priorities so you did not have time for the things that were really important? Did you get distracted from what you were working on too often or for too long? Think about how you can do better next time – maybe improve your estimates of how long different things take or do your work in a quieter place with fewer distractions. 4) Keep trying. Managing time well doesn’t happen right away, and we all have to keep working on it all the time. If you keep a record of how you are doing and keep trying, you will surely see your progress over the course of a few months. 5) Celebrate when you reach a big goal that took a lot of time and commitment! We all need to have fun and celebrate our hard work and success. Good luck!