This Year Achieve Your Goals!
Are your New Year’s resolutions already fading into the background? You’re not alone. Many of us feel constantly busy yet struggle to make meaningful progress on what truly matters. The solution isn’t working harder—it’s working smarter.
This week we begin a new 4 week series on time management.
Many of us set goals at the beginning of the year. By March, however, the beautiful spring weather arrives. Many of those goals soon become faint will o’ the wisps in the field. They quietly fade into the background.
We can overcome this by becoming more efficient in our day to day activities. In this episode, we will learn how to schedule our success.
We will create an easy quick assessment tool to audit our daily activities. Begin by listing the activities you have planned for the week. Assign each activity a number from 1 to 10. The activity with the highest priority receives a 1. This is our P1, our highest priority. The lowest priority receives a 10.
If you are unsure whether an activity should be a 1 or a 10 then give it a quiz.
- If this activity didn’t get done, would anyone notice?
- Would you feel like something was missing if it didn’t get completed this week, or ever?
If something would be missed, give it a lower number.
If every activity on the list ends up being a 1, you may be trying to complete too many high priority tasks at once. This is a sign that you may need to remove some activities or reasses the calendar and redistribute tasks throughout the year.
Many us feel incredibily busy, but at the end of the day we have not made identifiable progress. By prioritizing activities and completing the most important ones first, we ensure that we remain aligned with our goals.
Distractions and habits can easily take over our day and prevent us from achieving what matters most. By using the time audit we are about to learn, we can intentionally fill our day with our highest priority and most meaningful work.
When we do our most important work first, life becomes more fulfilling and satisfying. The day will seem to flow by with ease because we have scheduled the activities that will make our dreams a reality.
Let’s learn how to get our time back.
After completing the time audit, you will be able to identify low priority activities that are vampirishly sucking the life out of your day. The first step is awareness.
Overcome Unconscious Habits
Awareness begins our journey toward the land of increased productivity, success and fulfillment. It is easier to change habits when we understand them. Instead of placing a new habit on top of an old habit, let’s first learn to identify the benefits we get from them.
Our old habits persist because they benefit us in some way. Next week we will uncover what keeps us stuck in those habits. This will help us easily replace them.
Progress happens on a daily basis. The small steps we take each day toward our goals snowball into massive change over months and years. The key is to get our snowball rolling in the right direction.
This process doesn’t take a lot of time. In fact, you may discover that you accomplish more in less time. In turn, you will have more time to enjoy your favorite activities.
We will learn a simple process to make old, unsupportive habits so obvious that it becomes easier to change.
We will learn to objectively shine a light on old, dark habits that hold us back. Our blind spots can be our biggest barriers to success. When we drive a vehicle there’s a certain area that we can’t see. This is our blind spot.
In life we have blind spots. Ready to learn how to identify blind spots and make quantum leaps to a much higher level of success?
The key is to start with our daily habits. What do we do every day? Our activities eithe r move us toward our dreams or they push them further away.
You can begin this audit today or tomorrow. Once you start, track your time for up to one week. You may notice clear blind spots after only a few days. These obvious blind spots will be ones you want to address right away.
How to Conduct a 15 Minute Time Audit
This is a one week exercise. Schedule it on the calendar right now. You can begin the exercise tomorrow but schedule it on the calendar right now. If you don’t want to wait until tomorrow you can begin today.
What You’ll Need for the Time Audit
- A notebook and pen that you carry with you at all times during the week
- As an alternative, you can use a Google Doc, Google Sheet or Notepad app on your phone.
For the least amount of distractions a notebook and pen is recommended.
How the Time Audit Works
Starting from the moment you wake up, write down what you do every 15 minutes. For example, if you wake up at 5 am, write 5 am on the paper. Next to it, write, ‘woke up’.
Then, every 15 minutes record the time and the activity for the time block that you just finished.
If you are in a meeting you don’t need to write, ‘in a meeting’ repeatedly. Simply note the beginning and end time. If you want to audit the contents of the meeting for effectiveness, then every 15 minutes write down one or two discussion points.
When reviewing later, you will be able to see if the meeting stayed on track or drifted off course.
The audit does not need to be an exact replicate of the day. If it took 10 minutes to dress in the morning and 5 minutes to brush your teeth, you can write ‘teeth/clothes’. This exercise is about finding major activities that are vampirishly stealing the day. Brushing our teeth and getting dressed are expected routine activities.
You don’t need a timer. If you surfed the web for 33 minutes and 14 seconds, in the notebook it is okay to write 30 minutes or 45 minutes surfing the web.
Major habits will become obvious over the course of the week.
Conclusion
As we finish this episode, I want to leave you with a brief example of the first few hours to give you an idea of how this will look in your notebook.
Example: First Few Hours of the Day | 15 Minute Time Tracking Audit
5:00 am Brush/Shower/Dress
5:30 Breakfast
6:30 Drive
7:15 Emails
8:00 Meeting
9:30 Check Reports
11:00 Class
12:30 Lunch
The 15 minute time audit can help reclaim hours each week. It will help you focus on your personal goals and dreams, not what society or others think is best.
Keeping the audit takes very little time. It takes about 30 seconds to open the notebook, write the time and the activity.
I like to prefill my audit notebook with the time slots from waking until bedtime. This way I open the notebook and fill the activity at the appropriate time.
Arthur Ashe has stated:
‘Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.’
Many of us view the new year as a time to reinvent ourselves. By using the time audit we uncover our blind spots. This will help us better align our activities with what truly matters.
Now that you have the steps for the time audit, go through it this week. Next week we will discuss ways to identify the benefits we receive from our old habits. This will help us replace them.
By using the time audit we no longer need to hope we will find the time to get things done this year. Instead, we will find the time to work on a daily basis to achieve our goals.