Time — How is best to take control of it?

Being a student at Cardiff Met, I can’t praise the opportunities that we’re given enough. For instance, this time next week I’ll have just touched down in Rome to provide PA support to the Welsh Colleges football team in their bid to win their first international trophy. In the the next twenty four hours though, I have a team code and individuals to complete, gather all the data from the GPS devices, make the necessary amendments to the dashboard to include this data, and also gather some opposition analysis for both the Met Women’s team and Welsh Colleges. This is not forgetting to crack on with the number of assignments still left to do, opening up the studio in the morning, catching up there and finishing up necessary paperwork from last week. Never has the saying “there aren’t enough hours in a day” felt so real.

This year I’ve added to my workload by going back in to education and am making the most of the opportunities in front of me, but I’ve really had to manage my time even more than I originally thought I might, so here’s a little something that has come to mind over the last few weeks and things I worked on to make the shift a little easier.

In my experience, sleep and keeping hydrated is key to making this all happen and run as smoothly as possible. I always manage to get around 6.5 hours sleep, this seems to serve me well. I also enjoy everything that I do, I’ve never been one to do anything that I don’t enjoy, therefore constantly being motivated allows me to go that little extra to finish what I intended to finish that day. Of course, there are always the longer term projects that very often get longer, but very often this isn’t a bad thing, as learning more and more means that I’ve saved time in not adding something to a project that I can now see a new, better way of doing.

You hear accountants talk about always having a 30% contingency in your budget, and this is something I like to take in to time management. If it looks like I’m going to have a 1o hour day, that would mean that I need to bare in mind the 3 hours contingency. This obviously seems like a lot of hours to add to your working day, so I might need to adjust my days expectations, it’s more positive to add more than to take away from your day. Look at the amount of time we probably spend looking at Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin aimlessly. There’s a great app that i’m struggling to find that calculates the amount of active time spent within each application on your computer, it’s a great insight. This really showed me how much time I was wasting, it allowed me to analyse and focus my behaviour while working — This took a great deal of practice, and making a cup of tea was much better than going through my neighbours, cats, cousins holiday photo’s from last August.

There’s a lot of literature on burnout that I’ve read in the past, from coaches to nurses, and stock brokers to taxi drivers and of the many of things that I’ve taken from it, the two main aspects are enjoyment and appreciation. Of course there are always certain things that have to be done, for instance I hate HMRC paperwork, but what it allows me to do be my own boss and save paying an accountant, so I go on an extra holiday each year. I appreciate the benefits that this gives me.

I still don’t have the perfect answer, I don’t believe anyone does, but what I’ve learnt is that a little bit of discipline goes a long way. For instance it’s allowed me to write this blog, something that I didn’t plan on doing today.

AA