Month: January 2019

Making Time for Life

It would be inaccurate for me to tell you that I didn’t have a mild, mental, time management related, meltdown as the New Year started. There are so many things I want to do! I want to begin pushing my career forward again, which means getting to work on time (I’m notorious about being late), staying late, going to more happy hours, pursuing mentor relationships, and basically that corporate hustle. I want to finally help my mom start our Etsy shop that we’ve taking about for almost two years. I want to achieve 365 outdoor miles. I want to run five 5k’s. I need to plan my wedding (April 2020 what’s up!) and continue to build and foster my relationship with my fiancé. Last, but not least I want to devote the proper time to this blog and my writing.  THERE IS SO MUCH TO DO!

So if you’re like me, and you have big aspirations and big dreams to balance your personal life needs with your corporate life needs, I’ve laid out my plan below for the year. Feel free to steal, execute, and critique.  I stole little bits of my plan from what’s worked before, from a book I’ve started reading about creating more time with the time you have, and life advice from those closest to me. I’m excited to see how it goes, and if anyone else has additional idea to try please leave it in the comments below!

STEP ONE:

– SEPARATE THE IMPORTANT FROM THE INSIGNIFICANT 

I put down on paper everything that is important to me. That’s everything from the big things (like I listed above), to the little one time things like doctors appointments and getting my vehicle registered in California. 

– PICK YOUR ORGANIZER
I picked up a big monthly & weekly planner that allows me to plan my day based on time, top 3 important items, and a to-do list. It even has a spot for what I’m looking forward to this evening and my gratitude for the day. I appreciate that It separates the “important items” from the “to do list” because it really allows you to feel accomplished if all you were able to do is 3 things. So what my to–do list is a mile long, I accomplished the three most important things and that makes my brain happy. 
I include the most important work items in my planner but I also have a smaller to-do notebook on my desk to organize my ten hour work days. It makes me feel so much more accomplished when I get to mark things off as done and motivates me to work harder!
– CUT DOWN ON SCREEN TIME
I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to my phone but I also am not the best at putting it down. Thanks to some nifty new settings from Apple I’ve set myself up for success. First I scheduled “screen down time” from 9pm to 5am which means that only phone calls are allowed in that time and everything else is turned dark. I’ve also set myself an hour limit for all social media apps and once I hit that all of those applications also go dark no matter what time of the day it is. “Going dark” just means that the application icon dims and if you try to open it a message pops up stating that it is locked. You can easily choose to bypass it but it’s a nice simple reminder to my brain that I’ve reached my time limit for the day and to go do something more useful.
– FOSTER A SPACE FOR SUCCESS

When things are dirty or cluttered it’s like my whole brain freezes up. It puts me in a bad mood, I can’t focus, and things just don’t get done. So first off I took an entire weekend to deep clean my apartment. I didn’t only just take out the trash and vacuum but I went through every bin, box, closet, and shelf to toss anything I didn’t need or didn’t find useful. I then reorganized what I had left and finally even got some of my pictures up on the wall I’ve been putting off. Now that everything is clean I make sure to pickup every time I leave the room. I fold the blanket, put the glass in the sink, put the cat toys back where they belong. Every little thing adds up and walking into my apartment now is so relaxing. 

– GET UP EARLY 

This is probably the hardest part for me. But after my fiancé mentioned my ten thousand alarms disrupts his sleep in the morning (lucky duck gets to go to work later than me) I had two reasons to get up early! Now I try to get up on my first alarm, as hard as it is to drag my butt from the bed. My goal is to have time to drink a cup of coffee AT HOME, get ready (which is a snap now that everything is clean and organized) and sit down to read/journal/write a bit before heading off to work. I’m not noticing that my body misses that extra 20/30 minutes of sleep but my brain loves having time to really wake up before getting in the car for work. It tricks me into thinking I have more time, since I can do things for myself before and after my work day.

And that’s what I have so far. It’s still a work in progress, like almost everything in my life. However, it feels so much better than all the clutter I had in my head and my life beforehand. Never be fearful about changing up your routine and until next time, keep on Roaming!