This Is How To Prioritize Your Time

Millions of women are in the world, with millions of tasks they must get done daily. But you are only one person. You cannot do it all. So prioritize what gets done and what gets pushed to the next day or delegated to someone.

1. Examine your day’s to-do list and begin with an essential item on your list.

My colleague Karen Stally calls this eating your frog. There is a book by Brian Tracey titled Eat That Frog. Wendy Cole does workshops where she hands out chocolate frogs. 

A frog is your biggest, most important task. It is the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you do not do something about it first. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your results at this moment.

There is a psychological reason you want to do it this way. When you do the critical projects first and complete them, it gives you a burst of feel-good hormones, and it makes you feel more energized and more like tackling other items on your list.

Eating the frog requires women to push back against external and internal distractions and prioritize the actions that bring them closer to reaching goals.

Plus, you get to see that you are progressing. When you begin with the most straightforward task or the fastest task and put off the most important task, there is a likelihood you may not get to it by the time the day ends. And that allows anxiety to set in.

Mark Twain is cited as declaring, “If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.”

 I really hope he was not speaking literally!

2. Reject opportunities that will take up too much of your time.

You cannot be involved in every activity, and you cannot attend every single meeting that you would like to. You will end up overextended and exhausted. When working from home and there are several webinars you would like to attend, but you are already struggling with time management, there is a way to pick which ones to attend. 

Look at the webinars that will give you the most benefit personally and professionally. Sometimes there might be something you are interested in, but it is not advantageous for your time management schedule. This means you pass on those.

3. Get some rest.

When you push yourself to go beyond what you should do by cutting back on sleep, it eventually catches up to you. When you lose sleep, it causes you to lose focus.

This means you will start doing sloppy work, and you will find yourself having to redo work. Or you are slow to begin. Not only that, but as you give up your needed rest, it weakens your immune system, and you will be more vulnerable to catching whatever virus is going around.

You will lose time instead of being a good manager of it. You might want to stay up late and wake up early to get more accomplished, but being well-rested affords you to become far more productive, and quality increases, too.

4. Care for yourself in other ways, too.

Make sure that you get the exercise you need. Exercise helps you with time management because it keeps energy levels elevated.

Taking a break from personal and work tasks gives your mind a chance to refresh and return to the project with a fresh outlook. Improved focus aids productivity and saves time.

5. Take time off.

There can be an inclination to work full speed ahead, no matter what it takes, to get everything on your list done. Many women give up time with friends and family to try to gain more time.

They bring work home on weekends or labor over their to-do lists all weekend around the house, trying to get everything done. Some women have not had a vacation in years, not just because they cannot afford it, but because they do not feel like they have the time.

But when you take time off, away from everything you need to do, you end up getting more done because your mind needs time where there is absolutely nothing that “must” be focused on at the moment.