Time Management Tips: Don’t know What to Do Next?
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Just thinking about everything you need to do may leave you feeling overwhelmed, and unsure about where to start. You may also worry that you aren’t even sure if you know everything you have to do. Here are some time management techniques you can use to get unstuck and going again. The best way to get yourself out of this mess is to identify where you really are. Start with a blank piece of paper and list all the actions you’ve committed to taking. Don’t list things that involve more than one action or ideas.
You want to list actions for two reasons. When you list actions you know exactly what you need to do so it’s easier to just do it. When you list ideas or things that involve more than one action your mind has to sort through the idea and identify the individual actions every time you see this thing on your list.
This just increases your feelings of overwhelm and stress, and that’s exactly what you don’t want. Listing just actions makes it easy for you because there are no decisions involved, and you don’t have to take time to figure things out. You just see the action, decide on which action to take, and take the action. So what do you do with those ideas and multiple action things? With those things just enter the next logical action you need to take. And if your idea is something you want to take action on someday, but not now park it on a separate idea list.
Now that you have everything on one list, even though it may be many pages, you’re ready to start to de-stress. Set aside some thinking time where you can begin to define your long term goals. Until you figure out what you really want to accomplish where you really want to be in life you live the life of the mindless automaton.
The mindless automaton just goes through the motions each day allowing everyone and everything else to decide how they will invest their time. If you want to succeed at anything in life you never want to behave this way. Rather know where you want to go and how you’re going to get there so you can develop good time management skills.
When you know where you’re going and why, you can decide what to do next. It’s not possible to do everything on your list at once, but you can decide which things to take off your list and I want you to do that now. Don’t be shy take anything that isn’t moving you closer to your big picture goals off your list, and then only prioritize the top three actions you need to take each day one day at a time. As you do this day in and day out and you’ll get where you want to be before you know it.
