6 Strategies To Help You Maximize Your Time

Here are six strategies found helpful over the years.

1️⃣ Do your to-do list the night before. This acts a bit like a usb download for your brain, which may help you switch off at home.

2️⃣ Use the Ivy Lee Method. James Clear wrote about this in one of his earliest blog posts. Ivy Lee was an industrialist known for their productivity. His secret? He only ever allowed six items on his to-do list. Nothing got added until those six things were crossed off. Only if he had time available, would he add anything more.

3️⃣ If you’re going to do anything first, make it the most important thing. Depending what it is, you might not be able to finish it first thing, but you might make a massive dent in whatever it is. That can give you a feel-good boost for the rest of the day.

4️⃣ Set your intention for the day. I mentioned this in yesterday’s post. If you’re not clear on what you need to achieve for you to feel like you’ve had a successful day, it can mean you end up a bit aimless, doing a bit of this, and a bit of that.

5️⃣ Use your calendar to block out time for tasks and put a boundary around this. Back in my corporate life, for important tasks, I used to mark them as private and colored them red. That signaled to people someone important was happening and I was less likely to get sent a meeting invite. This didn’t work all the time, but worked quite a lot. And if someone sent a meeting invite, I’d decline because… boundaries.

6️⃣ Reverse engineer your day. Cal Newport talks about this in his brilliant book, Deep Work. Identify the latest time you’re prepared to work that day, and then reverse engineer what you can realistically get done by then and when. Then pop it in your diary. And sometimes this means moving a meeting, or even better, declining it.