Building a Daily Routine
Personal time management can be a challenge when going to school. Going to class, getting all your homework done, and doing all those extracurricular activities will eat up a lot of your time. If you manage your time poorly, you’ll have no time to yourself, and your grades or work performance may suffer.
The earlier you start building a routine the better. If you are in high school, college, or beyond managing your time will be an essential key to your success. Instead of wasting time thinking about what you’re going to do in a day, you already know what you want to accomplish and when. It helps you create a habit of accomplishing things and makes you more efficient and effective when performing a task.
Use these tips and techniques to create a routine, stick to it, and maximize your productivity.
Create your schedule
Write down a routine that you can stick to. Create it on a calendar, in a planner, or somewhere where you’re going to reference it often. First, schedule the events you have to do at certain times, like classes, work, meals, and sleep (yes, sleep is important). Next, make time slots for more important tasks such as homework, studying, and physical fitness. Do this all the way down to creating down time for things like watching TV or playing video games.
The ultimate goal is to follow this personal time management routine every day without thinking about it. But at first, it will help to write it down.
Stick to the task at hand
The goal of building a routine is to efficiently complete a task in the least amount of time possible. Multi-tasking will slow you down. It may appear quicker to do your math homework while talking with a parent on the phone, but in reality, it wastes time. You won’t be much fun to talk with, you’re more prone to making a mistake on your homework, and ultimately, you will do two things bad instead of one thing good.
If your routine or planner says you should be gardening, ignore as many things as possible. Let the phone ring. Grab the mail when you’re done. Watch TV after the weeds are pulled. Tell friends you can hang out in an hour or so. Multi-tasking is a time waster, not a wise business time management technique.
Be flexible
It would be great if you could stick to a routine every day without disruption. Unfortunately, it won’t always work out. Maybe your friends want to do a study group when you’d normally be working out. You don’t have to tell them that it’s exercise time. Go study with your friends and workout when you planned to do homework. You can be flexible and still accomplish what you need to.
You may even have to completely eliminate a task. If your boss asks you to stay late at work, evaluate if there is something more important you need to do. If there isn’t, go ahead and eliminate reading or TV time. The extra hours at work help you earn some extra money. Or maybe you’re too exhausted to clean the bathroom. Take a nap if that will help you feel better. Be flexible but still accomplish the tasks at hand.
Some tips and techniques for starting a daily routine
• Go to bed and get up at the same time every day
• Eat meals, snacks, and bathe at certain times
• Exercise first thing in the morning
• Make sure you do something fun at least once a week
• Make sure you get at least 8 hours of sleep a night
• Get things like clothes, books ready the night before
• Do homework right after class. That way, the information is still fresh in your mind.
• Evaluate your daily routine each night. Was there something you wanted to do but didn’t get around to it?
Change your routine as necessary. Give yourself some slack each day and do something on a whim. Personal time management routines help you accomplish tasks more efficiently, and will help you accomplish more each day.
Gregg Zban is a General Manager with Coca-Cola Enterprises and has created a website dedicated to better Time Management, Sales Training, Interview Coaching, Leadership Development and more!
To learn more please visit www.choice-time-management.com
For freebies please visit www.GreggZban.com
