What is the time management worksheet?
Managing time well can be harder in a busy, fast-moving world. The worksheet below helps you assess how you currently spend your time and offers suggestions that may improve your time management, efficiency, and productivity.
Step one: assess how you spend your time
Choosing a typical day, you might track how you spend your time in fifteen-minute intervals. A simple way is a spreadsheet where each row is a fifteen-minute interval (7:00 am, 7:15, 7:30, and so on) and each column is a type of activity, such as sleep, shower, breakfast, commute, work, kids, dinner, TV, reading, or email. Add up the time in each category, ideally across more than one day, average the results, and draw your own conclusions.
Tips for time management
- Prioritize. Sorting tasks into three groups: those that must be finished today, those due within a day or two, and those farther out.
- Make a daily schedule. Writing a to-do list each morning in order of priority, and doing the top items first.
- Delegate. Looking for tasks that can appropriately be shared, such as asking for support at work or at home.
- Identify and eliminate distractions and time-wasters. Noticing activities that drain your time, like staying up late with TV or getting pulled into conflicts that don’t concern you.
- Learn to say “no.” Being wary of taking on extra work that will postpone your own plans. Saying no often gets easier with time.
- Avoid perfectionism. Setting time limits for tasks and tolerating that the result might not be perfect.
- Just do it. Spending at least 10 to 15 minutes each day on a task you dread.
Sources and cautions
The tips in this worksheet came from several sources, including the Mayo Clinic’s online resources and Michelle Craske and David Barlow’s book Mastery of Your Anxiety and Worry.
In a hectic world there may simply not be enough time for everything you would like to do, so you might struggle with time management even after trying these tips. Being gentle and patient with yourself can help. You may also get some negative feedback when you begin saying no, and it can help to trust that you know best what you can handle. Sometimes it is also necessary to adjust your expectations of how much you can do in a day.
