Master your time (and stop letting it master you)

November 13, 2023

Welcome to The Productivity Blueprint newsletter 🗞️

To begin, we wanted to ask how everyone did with our challenge to break down their bad habits last week?! Any patterns you had never noticed before? Any movement on breaking those habits?

If you missed last week, you can catch up here 🙂 

Today we’re introducing some of the best time management strategies to help you win this upcoming week 🙌 Let’s dive in.

"Time isn't the main thing. It's the only thing.”

Miles Davis

If you’re like us, and sometimes find yourself wondering where the time went at the end of your day, this article may be for you. Dr. Michelle Rozen, who has a pHD in Psychology and is also known as ‘the change doctor’, shares some key skills and tips to make the most of your time.

Let’s take a look at these skills:

  1. Prioritization: Learn how to prioritize tasks effectively to make the most of your time. This essentially means two main things: letting go of the idea of perfection (nobody has poorer time management skills than perfectionists), and letting go of what is not an absolute must (time to start saying no).

    1. Ask yourself ‘How important is this task today, between 0 and 10?” If you have certain things that you rate as a 10, those are the things that you are going to focus on. The twos, the ones, the threes, they can wait for later.

  2. Goal Setting: Discover the power of setting clear, achievable goals. Never start your day without a to-do list (full of 10s, hopefully). If you don’t plan, you will end up being managed by your day instead of you being in control of it.

  3. Time Blocking: Divide your day into focused blocks of time dedicated to specific tasks or activities. Make sure these blocks are dedicated to your plan for the day, eliminating distractions around you.

  4. Delegation: Learn the art of delegating tasks to maximize productivity. Everyone around you is capable of doing something, and you don’t need to take ownership over everything.

  5. Stress Management & Self-care: Explore stress management methods for a healthier work-life balance. If you don’t manage your stress, it’s going to impact your productivity, and ultimately your entire life. Explore what works for you: walks, baths, yoga, talking to a friend- and make the conscious choice to do it. Your productivity, and well-being will thank you for it.

While this article only really touches the surface on maximizing productivity (we could go deeper into each of these tips) it really does breakdown some of the essentials. From here, you can gain insight into which part you may need to improve on (for example, I have the goal setting down, but my prioritization and delegation skills definitely need some work).

As Dr. Rozen puts it:

"Mastering these skills can unlock your potential and lead to a more fulfilling, balanced life."

Toggl is a time tracking tool that helps you monitor how you spend your time on different tasks and projects. It's great for tracking billable hours, managing projects, and improving time management. Getting a clear picture of how you are spending your time can really help in becoming more productive and efficient.

What we love: The chrome extension! This makes it even simpler to begin and stop tracking as needed (although, I somehow still do forget!)

Todoist is a task and project management app that allows users to organize their to-do lists and collaborate with others. It offers features like due dates, labels, and priority levels for efficient task management.

What we love: 2 things: the simplicity of the tool (hello clean, organized dashboards) and the Trevor AI integration. TrevorAI lets you organize your tasks directly into your calendar, so you can really implement the time-blocking skill into your planning.

💡 Challenge of the week

Score every task you plan into your day/week on the scale of 0-10 surrounding importance, with 0 being not important/urgent, and 10 being extremely.

Hopefully, this can help us all ensure we are prioritizing the right tasks.

Looking forward to hearing how this goes for everyone next week.

Until then,

The Productivity Blueprint Team