How I manage my time!

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s managing my time. Sure, I’m not always the most punctual when it comes to social events; I live by my own clock, people… sorry [forever].

Splitting my time between ALL of my other extracurricular activities, though, is where I flourish.

Here are some of my pointers on how to GET. THINGS. DONE!

LEARN HOW TO SAY NO

I have ambitions to become a full time writer and that, for me, is 70% more important than quite a few things. Other’s may not understand but I do have to put a lot of my ‘free’ time into writing/editing etc. so I have become a pro at saying ‘no’ to social events. I am not great at activities with a big group of people, anyway, but a lot of the time I say no because I want to write, or, I’ve spent a lot of time writing so I want time to relax… alone. So I say ‘No’. Learn the word. Be your own excuse.

GET AN EARLY START

I wake up on week days at 7am. At the weekends I wake up at 7am. I don’t really get a lie in because of Juno [The Puppy] likes to get up early. I wish I could sleep more but I know, in the long run, early mornings [hey! It’s early for me] mean I get LOADS more done.

LEARN HOW TO LATE NIGHT

On the flip side I do run to midnight almost every night. That’s when I’m aiming to finish doing whatever I’m doing. It makes for a long day, especially when you’ve worked in an office for 7 hours, but it’s what I need to do to feel like I’ve accomplished stuff.

LEARN HOW TO RELAX

On the tail end of early mornings and late nights I do have to take breaks. Some days I allow myself the option of doing NOTHING. Sure I still do the long 7am to 12pm days but I have days where all I do is make dinner and have a shower. LUXURY.

MAKE A LIST & PRIOTATISE

I love lists. You can actually buy notebooks with prefilled list options. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen them! I always have to tell myself NOT to buy them because I probably could stand to stop writing lists. Mine usually reside in my head. If I started writing them all down my whole house would be filled with them. Still, I find them helpful. I make a list of everything I want to do; write, edit, read, watch TV, go for a walk, make dinner… literally everything I need to do in the day. I decide which ones are the most important and then I work my way though the list.

ALLOCATE TIME

To follow on from the lists I allocate time. Usually an hour or two depending on the activity but I need to set a time limit, otherwise I can spend WAY too long doing one thing. Normally reading… and watching TV… because they’re the laziest things to do so I obviously want to do them forever!

MULTI-TASK

Yep. True to women-kind everywhere I am a pro multi-tasker. I’m doing it right now, in fact. I have multiple tabs open on my computer which I’m going through periodically. I am writing a few blog posts today whilst watching Gilmore Girls. I’m winning, basically.

I know these are pretty bog standard notions but they help me do a million things so hopefully they’ll help you too!

Sam