How to Make the Best Use of Your Time
We all want to increase our productivity and be more successful.
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Have you ever wished you had more time, or felt like you didn’t have enough time to get everything you wanted accomplished? What we don’t realize is that we have a lot of time, we just need to be able to realize it and track it to make sure we are using our precious time efficiently.
We all want to increase our productivity and be more successful. Read this post for the key lessons I’ve learned from Harvard reviewed CEOs to Laura Vanderkam’s book, How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time.
How CEOs spend their time
CEOs, of course, have a great deal of help and resources, however, they, more than anyone else in the organization, confront an acute scarcity of one resource: time!
In a Harvard Business Review article published May 2018 by management guru Michael Porter, a study tracked 27 CEOs time for three months. An interesting conclusion was drawn:
Where and how CEOs are involved determines what gets done. It signals priorities.
Many who follow me know that I treat my life like a business, and where I am involved both personally and in business determines what I get done and what priorities get accomplished! Not rocket science, it actually makes the most sense and we really didn’t need to read about CEOs to figure that out.
What is also interesting is aside from the regular meetings and productive work there was still time for personal well-being. Agenda-driven, limiting routine responsibilities, relying heavily on direct reports and holding effective meetings were the main conclusions that were drawn from the article.
One part of the article I found especially important was the emphasis on well-being.
“Given that work could consume every hour of their lives, CEOs have to set limits so that they can preserve their health and their relationships with family and friends. Most of the CEOs in our study recognized that. They slept, on average, 6.9 hours a night, and many had regular exercise regimens, which consumed about 9% of their non-work hours (or about 45 minutes a day). To sustain the intensity of the job, CEOs need to train—just as elite athletes do. That means allocating time for health, fitness, and rest.” — Just like the rest of us!
Time-management for busy women
Now onto only busy women. This book by Laura Vanderkam follows busy business women with kids to see how the balancing act is actually done. She collected hour by hour logs from successful women with surprising results . These women worked less and slept more than they thought they did! They exercised, played with their kids, and even had date nights. In her book, she shares these strategies for how to focus on scheduling quality family time and taking it easy on more mundane tasks that can be outsourced, such as housework. For the modern women, this is a must read to not only inspire but to validate that we can have it all.
Now that we have a handle on time management, next week I am sharing a very important topic to also help with time, which is email management.
