Managing Your Time Around Your Energy Levels

Knowing when your energy peak is and re-arranging your schedule could very well double your productivity!

Everyone manages his or her time in a different way. Some are more successful than others, some know why they’re successful with their time management, others don’t. Time management is rather simple to learn but can sometimes be challenging to apply.

When putting a schedule together you first have to determine your goals. What do you want to achieve? How have you been feeling lately? What is your motivation?

Most likely, you feel like you no longer have a healthy balance between your personal and professional life or are devoting too much time on one aspect of your life and neglecting the others.

The first thing you need to do when putting together a schedule that you’re going to stick with is:

1. Identify your energy cycle. Which time of the day do you have more energy – morning, afternoon, evening, night?

2. Do you work at a job with regular hours?

3. Are you on call?

4. Are you a stay-at-home-mom with young children?

5. What motivates you to put together a daily/weekly schedule?

For example, Brian owns his own software company and works from home. Because he is the only point of contact for his clients, he needs to make sure that he answers queries promptly. But because his client base in international, he can’t answer the phones 24/7. That also means he can make a work schedule on a 24 hour basis. Brian has also noticed he’s most productive between 10:00pm and 2:00am, that he has absolutely no energy between 2:00pm and 4:00pm and that he can work in the mornings but just on light mentally challenging tasks. Here is Brian’s optimum schedule.

7:00am to 8:00am: Walk dog/exercise, shower, breakfast

8:00am to 12:00pm: Answers emails, returns phone calls, meetings with clients, web demos

12:00pm to 12:30pm:Lunch

12:30pm to 2:00pm: Marketing and follow ups

2:00pm to 4:00pm: Catch up on some sleep

4:00pm to 6:00pm: Return Phone calls and emails

6:00pm to 7:30pm: Dinner & T.V.

7:30pm to 10:00pm: Marketing

10:00pm to 2:00am: Programming

2:00am to 7:00am: Sleep

Brian puts in a lot of hours like most of us do. The important thing to remember is that you need to do the most demanding tasks during your most productive time. For the rest of the day, work on things like filing or making appointments or anything that’s more ‘manual’ then intellectual.

A major energy drainer is doing things that you don’t like doing. For example, you need to call back a client that isn’t happy about a product she bought. You know that you’re going to get an ear full and you really wish you didn’t have to call her back!!!! But, by pushing it off, you will drain your energy even more and will increase your stress level as well.

Therefore, manage your time by making sure you do the things you like the least and/or that stress you, early in the morning or as soon as you get to work. Get them out of the way as soon as possible. You’ll be amazed at how good your day can get if you free yourself from stressful tasks early on.

Sounds simple enough, but there’s more to this than simply rearranging your schedule. If you want to learn lots more about making the time you’re awake ten times more productive and fulfilling, follow this link and let me show you how http://www.effectivetimemanagement.com

Catherine Nellissen has been organizing events for more then 11 years and has written numerous articles on time management. She is also the author of “Effective Time Management”.

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