Do you know how to organize your time effectively while working from home (WFH) full-time? Do you feel defeated and discouraged at the end of the week, Dear Readers, when you’ve realized that you haven’t moved an inch closer toward the goals you’ve set at the beginning of the year? What is stopping you, as a full-time employee, from achieving a meaningful life outside of work? Keep reading to find out how to reclaim your time, plan your weeks more effectively, and find balance at last!
Welcome to new and returning readers to the Branding24Seven community!
The JMS team is back with valuable insights that will inspire you to be fearless in the pursuit of your dreams. Dear Readers, if it’s your first time here, welcome, and thanks for stopping by the JMS blog. FYI, JMS is a consulting firm located in Philadelphia that advises people and organizations to improve crisis and fiscal management. To that end, the JMS team is in the business of designing recovery plans as robust as possible that avoid behavioral and financial paralysis. Therefore, Dear Readers, this blog will help you make sense of these unprecedented times without feeling devoid of motivation and utterly defeated. You, Dear Readers, can find your groove again as soon as you get a handle on your time management.
Alright, Dear Readers, you have a job you like, a family you love, and a few projects you want to achieve. But you feel that you don’t have enough time to do all the things. Does that familiar? Meet Jesse, who came to JMS to improve her productivity both at work and at home. Simply put, she wanted to find balance!
As a supervisor in a nonprofit, she often feels overworked and underappreciated. She likes her job but dreams of becoming a small business owner one day. She told the JMS team that as far as she can remember, she has always been disorganized. But since the coronavirus forced her to work from home for the last ten months, she has been feeling more tired than ever. In short, she has been frustrated with her inability to accomplish anything meaningful outside of her job. Here is the two-step framework JMS clients adopt whenever they feel that their lives are out of control yet long for balance and peace of mind.
Step one: Define your priorities.
What is important to you? Do you know, Dear Readers? Often, we conflate priorities with wants and dreams. But, if you want to be productive, you have to be ruthless with your time management. Success is not for the faint of heart! So, go ahead and take an honest look in the mirror and identify your priorities for the next five years.
In the beginning, Jesse told us that she wanted to lose weight, start a business, buy a house, and spend more time with friends and family members. Do you see how some of these priorities appear to have competing time constraints? How can she want to spend more time with friends and start a business as a full-time nonprofit employee? Will she ever find balance and peace of mind?
Not for nothing, Dear Readers, but nonprofits are notorious for having a high burnout problem. She works long hours because she tends to put her work above her well-being. It all came to a head when what she thought was a heart attack but turned out to be a panic attack nailed her to the kitchen floor for what seemed to be an eternity. She was scared and alone in the middle of lockdown 2.0 here in Philadelphia. She finally crawled to the living room to call 911 and waited for an ambulance hoping, and praying that she wasn’t dying.
A week after this episode, she called JMS to help her reorganize her weekly schedule and prioritize what makes her happy: spending time with loved ones and going after her long-term goal to start a small business.
Step Two: Divide your time in chunks and assign bundles of tasks to each of them.
Many people reckon that they have to create a rigid daily routine to be productive. If that works for you, Dear Readers, great! Keep at it! But, if you’ve ever experienced a setback or unplanned event three days in a row, you know that daily planning is not the best metric to evaluate your level of productivity.
Instead, this blog invites you to learn to look at the entire week and organize your tasks accordingly. In the same way that you know that your full-time job takes between 40 to 50 hours a week, you should have an idea of how much extra time you have to accomplish all the things that matter to you weekly!
Consequently, this blog suggests organizing your week around predetermined chunks of time. The easier way to figure out what you are working with is to examine how you spend 24 hours. Here is how Jesse spends hers:
As you see, Dear Readers, you have three daily blocks to fit in everything meaningful to you without encroaching on the necessary rest we should all get every night without fail! With this new schedule, Jesse can sleep eight hours every night, workout every morning, and put aside 21 hours every week to work toward starting a side hustle she hopes can become a full-fledged small business in about a year. Come back next month to find out how you, Dear Readers, can manage all areas of your life and keep productivity at all times high.
Final thoughts.
There you have it! The JMS team thanks you, Dear Readers, for taking the time to read today’s publication. The branding24seven community is here to inspire and encourage as you, Dear Readers, are embarking on the exhilarating journey to design the career of your dreams.
Dear Readers, we want to hear from you! How do you plan on organizing your weeklies in 2021? Did you like this idea of breaking your day into definite chunks? Which block do you plan on incorporating into your weeklies? How do you find balance and peace of mind? What did we miss? What else can this blog cover that will motivate you and help you be as successful as possible in 2021, Dear Readers?
Let us know by email at jms@branding24seven.com or by mail at JMStrategy LLC
21 S. 11th Street, 2nd Floor, Philadelphia, PA, 19107.
Dear Readers, if it has left you inspired to chase the life of your dreams, please share it with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances! Until next time, Dear Readers, here are a few publications to get the ball rolling on a successful goal-setting journey!
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