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Break Free From These 3 Time Stealers
Marilyn Orr
As is often the case for business owners, naming my business required a lot of wrestling. Capacity Building Coaching is about helping clients build their own personal capacity - with better emotional spaces, improved thinking, healthier habits, increased assertiveness and better strategy. It’s also about increasing the capacity of your business and team by doing all of these same things at both the individual level and at the group level.
One big component to increased capacity is more strategic use of time. That, obviously, is one of our most important resources and one that we actually have some control over.
Let’s look at some ideas on how to be more strategic with your use of time so that you free up time for what you know really matters - in your career and in your life.
Social media - if you like this stuff at all or need to use it for your job you know that you could spend all day on it and not have much, if anything to show for it at the end of the day.
What are some less subtle time stealers though?
1. Stressing about something without moving it to action.
How many hours have been spent mulling something over when the actual action to “fix” or move it forward requires far less time!
Ideas:
- Ask yourself “what is the first step I could take to get some movement on this?”.
- Ask someone else to listen to the situation and ask you questions to help get you unstuck.
- Book a one-off with a coach or therapist (depending on the nature of the stressor).
- Switching between tasks.
2. Constantly switching between tasks.
My personality makes me a master at this! There's lots of research showing how much time it takes when we switch between tasks.
Ideas:
- The book “The One Thing” is great on this point and their website also has some great tips and free resources! https://www.the1thing.com/resources/
- Block off specific times to focus on one specific thing, even if you have to start with just a short amount of time. Make sure to remove distractions during that time!
- Not planning ahead.
3. Being overwhelmed.
So, I’ve got time to work but I don’t know where to start. Overwhelming and sometimes parallelizing.
Ideas:
- Either first thing in the morning or, even better yet, the night before, plan out priorities for the next day. (We can do this weekly too as we get better at it.)
- If you have repetitive tasks you may be able to regularly give certain times to certain things.
- Keep a journal of both creative ideas and “to dos”. Sometimes we need to just get practical things done to move forward and sometimes we need to be creative for a bit so we can get to the practical stuff.
We could keep going with this but I bet if we all used just these strategies regularly we would be shocked at how much time and energy we free up!!!
I’d love to hear your struggles or strategies! Drop me a line.
What do you want to do differently this week?
Until next week,
Marilyn
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