Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do in your business?
Have you ever turned to time management books for tips on how to “work smarter and not harder”?
Maybe you’ve tried “batching” or the “pomodoro technique” or DDD (delegate, ditch or deal with it) and although these approaches can help, I want you to understand something that will shift the way you work.
“You can’t manage time, you can only manage your energy.”
Time just ticks away, tik, tok, tik, tok. It doesn’t wait around for you. It doesn’t wait around for anyone.
Everyone has the same amount of time in a day, it’s how you utilise that time which makes the difference.
When you are more aligned in your business and are doing things that you feel more passionate about and which also play to your strengths, you become totally absorbed in what you are doing and time seems to just disappear. This is the flow state.
What’s more, you can spend a whole day on something and still feel energised at the end of the day.
However, when you do tasks that don’t play to your strengths, that you don’t enjoy, and often find quite difficult or boring, then time appears to drag. Things seem to take forever, you hit up against lots of snags and problems and you are also more likely to procrastinate.
So what do you do instead?
One way you can manage your energy is to spend a short period of time such as 30-40 minutes on the task in hand. As soon as you start noticing your energy drop off, stop the task and go do something that you enjoy and is easy for you to do. This will lift your energy and your mood.
Then later in the day, or the next day, do a little bit more on the task and repeat the process.
Although this might seem a bit stop and start and flies in the face of the time management approach of batching your time, you will pick up easily where you left off, as you are doing it so regularly.
Try it and see how much better and more energised you feel at the end of each day.
And if you would like help in aligning your business to your strengths, passions and personality and create more ease and flow, then reach out and let’s see if I can help.
