I somehow survived 5 grueling years of grad school. Somehow. Don’t ask me how because too many times I was convinced I’d never make it. But I did make it, and I do have some something to show for it beyond a highly specific wealth of knowledge and expertise in one small niche area of political science.
I can tell you this, I learned how to manage my time. I’m not going to tell you that I always followed the advice I’m about to lay out for you, but when I did, I usually did much better at each task I was working on. Grad school is all about time management, how well can you manage the things you have to do with the time you have—and still have a life.
While you may not be in grad school, something tells me that you’re likely still a busy person—as most people in America are—and any attainable time management tips will be helpful for you.
Now, you may find some blog posts that give you all kinds of lofty goals about being organized with your time, and they probably sound wonderful—in theory. You may have tried them some of these ideas too and perhaps even kept up with them for a bit, but usually, real-life kicks in and you end up getting off track and soon enough you just give it up all together.
I’m not here to give you a laundry list of ways you should be shaping up your life, but I can offer you a few tips to help you organize your time/tasks so that, even if you only use these tips on occasion, they help you out tremendously.
This is a first of two posts. I figured it might be less overwhelming for you to break my advice up a bit. The first bit of advice is really simple but you can’t really do the rest unless you first stop and do this!
Stop and Think and Write
What? Yes, if you’re getting so busy that you are randomly remembering things that you either forgot to do, or did half-way but never finished, the first thing you need to do is stop.
If you keep going, you’re going to end up messing something up in the rush or forgetting something all-together and just adding to your load. So, you need to first stop everything and think about what it is that you’re needing to get done.
Now, I’m not that fancy or complicated. Some people use apps or their computer or google calendar (which you can do, those can very helpful, but they are a bit time consuming). I’m a bit old fashioned and I like just a paper and pen. This means that my suggestion below can be done on the computer or app, I just happen to write it down in the old fashioned way.
After you’ve stopped and thought about what you have to do, write it down! You don’t even have to write the tasks down from most important to least important, doing that can take too much time. Simply writing what you have to do down is going to allow you to think through the activities you have to do and want to do. After initially writing it down, you can then either re-write the tasks in order of importance or even just number each task.
That’s it! I know it doesn’t seem like much, but just doing this is going to revolutionize your life and I promise, the next tip will just make it better. Until next time!
The Liberty Belle