How To-116: "How to Make Time by Prioritizing and Scheduling"

How to Make Time by Prioritizing and Scheduling

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You may not be able to create time, but you can manage your life effectively to maximize the time you spend with people, pets, work, friends, family, and just hanging around.

Steps

1. Identify your priorities. Select four or five things that you absolutely must do or are important to you. This may include work, school, a significant other, your family, anything that you feel you should devote a good amount of time to.
   
2. Write out every hour of the day on a piece of paper starting with the hour you wake up. If you wake up at 6:30 a.m., start with 6:00 a.m. Then make a list going to 7:00 a.m., 8:00 a.m., etc. until you’re back to the beginning. You’ve just made a schedule!
   
3. Determine what you need the most. A lot of people feel that their job is the most important – we have to earn money after all – so getting to work on time and leaving on time would be a high priority. Block out this time on your schedule.
   
4. Determine the other priorities, ranking the most important to the least important. Place these in your schedule where they fit.
   
5. Identify when you should go to sleep. Adults should get 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Teenagers should get about 8-10 hours of sleep, often in the form of a nap and 6-7 hours sleep. Children should get about 8-9 hours of sleep and a 1-2 hour nap.
   
6. Get into a regular sleeping rhythm, waking up at the same time in the morning and going to bed at the same time each night. This should coincide with your morning and evening priorities. Weekends should be no different than weekdays. Wake up at the same time all the time.

Tips

• If your priorities take more time than you have during the day, try making a schedule for every day of the week. Then cycle your priorities throughout the week so that by the end, you’ve spent a good amount of time on all of them.
  
• A good priority to have is free time. This will allow you to laze around the house if you need to, or go out with friends, or fix up or clean up your home. Don’t schedule this every day necessarily, but enough that you can get things done over a week’s time.
  
• Start your schedule at the beginning of the week. This way you can see all the changes you have made throughout the week. This will also get rid of the feeling that you are constantly catching up from when you didn’t have a schedule.
  
• Don’t be afraid to schedule things with only a little bit of time in between. Over-estimating the time between priorities can leave you with “dawdling” time that is just wasted. Every minute counts! So, schedule things tight, but not too tight in case you need to make changes.

Warnings

• If you sleep in on the weekends, this will make Mondays and Tuesdays all that much harder to wake up. Make sure to wake up at the same time every day, even on the weekends.
  
• Don’t schedule for other people! Each person has different priorities. If you want to help someone make a schedule and prioritize, sit down with them and walk them through these steps.

Things You'll Need

• Paper
  
• Pen or Pencil
  
• Will power

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