About Managing Your Time

About Managing Your Time

Ever since I started freelancing one of my main concerns has been time management skills. It is probably what I spent the most time researching about because even though the entire concept of working from home sounds appealing to the normal population to me, it felt like more of a challenge. Not that I need to be told what to do but the balance between that freedom and how effective you are in your work is very fragile and hard to manage. I'd love to say I have a good balance between work and life now but the truth friends is, I don't. I work on airplanes, camping trips, I take my work to my holiday retreats and more often then not check my email a thousand times while dinning and drinking. Le sigh.

I used to feel very anxious about it, specially when E was home and I felt like spending every waking second with her. What I've learned is that managing your time doesn't mean you'd have a perfect balance. It's all about knowing where your time is going and how you can be practical in some areas and detailed in others. For 4 years I've gone from monthly planners to weekly ones, to a moleskine, to a daily to-do list to nothing at all and at this time when I balance the shop, the blog, traveling and parenting all at the same time I've found that I only need two little sheets on my board, a monthly planner along with a weekly planner work wonders for me. Feel free to download this sheet so you know what I'm talking about.

On my monthly planner I take note of coming projects. Since I work on them 10 days at a time, every 10 days I have a new client. I also put down special notes about birthdays and important events, you know, like brunch with the moms at E's school and other geeky stuff I'm scared to mention.

On the weekly planner I write each task hour by hour (7:30am - 6:30pm) and label each task according to a category list. Each one of these has a color that helps me with tracking in a very visual way where my time is going. The categories on my list (because you won't see them in the printout) are 01. Shop Work 02. Blog Work 03. Fitness 04. Errands 05. Email Reply 06. Custom Project 07. Appointments 08. Leisure  09. Breaks

At the end of my week I take the sheet off my board and highlight all the activities according to the color corresponding the category and take a look at the colors to see where I'm slacking off and what I'm putting too much into. I'm not satisfied with the results every week but the fun of it all is that you can compensate, prioritize and be aware of your own needs at the same time. If you are a mom like me you probably know exactly what I mean and you're probably nodding while accidentally noticing the huge marker stain on your blouse... Ok, so I'm talking about me here.

I encourage you to use this weekly planner along with a monthly planner and place them close to your work area  so you're always aware of them. Think of your time like precious thing. Give some of that to yourself and write it down so it encourages you. You can have a label called "Me time" if like me, you forget you're human and have basic needs.

Please feel free to leave any tips, I'm always searching for new methods and thrilled to hear what you have to say.

original image by Noah Sahady