Tips for Managing Your Time

You have big dreams and aspirations. You know what you have to do in order to achieve those goals. But for some reason you’re not moving towards the goals you want and you and I know the main culprit. Time. You plan and try to set time aside everyday but somehow time evades you. At the end of the day you are left with no time, and no idea where it went!??

?Time is a struggle for most people, random menial tasks pile up and snatch away our ability to do what is really meaningful to us. Unfortunately, there is no way to add hours to the week, nor can we just abandon our responsibilities. So this leaves us with one option, managing our time better. Today, I'm going to share my way of managing time with you, so you can start devoting time to things you truly want.?

My time-management system is famously called Alison Edgar’s Big Balls, which some of you may know already. If you don't, it’s really not what it seems, I promise! The Alison Edgar’s Big Balls system aims to make your life easier by incorporating two factors to organise tasks:

Importance and urgency.?

These two things combine to create a fantastic way to help you decide whether you’re dedicating time to the right things. Mishandling time can be a massive obstacle in the way of your dreams and knowing exactly how to divide your time will give you a fantastic chance of success. As suggested by the name, Alison Edgar’s Big Balls attributes importance and urgency to different size balls. What balls am I talking about, well here they are:

Basketballs - Important and Urgent.

Imagine getting a basketball launched at your face. Well, that’s kind of how it feels if you forget one of these bad boys! These are the most critical tasks that need to be done and therefore require the most immediate attention. If you don’t complete them, the damage might be long-lasting!?

Tennis Balls - Urgent

These may not be the most important, but have to be done sooner rather than later. If you leave them, they can gradually build up until you have an absolute mountain of work to deal with. We’d rather avoid that. If you do happen to leave them, they will become basketballs and I promise that you’d rather not have too many of those.

Ping-pong balls - Important

These can be some of the things that are important to you but are not urgent. They linger in the background while you focus on more urgent tasks. Be careful though, just because they’re ping pong balls, doesn't mean that they will always stay this way. Don’t fall into the trap of always putting these off, try to deal with a few when you have some spare time.

Neither Important nor Urgent

This is the final category and the tasks here do not get assigned a ball because they don’t deserve one. If these things are not important or urgent to you, you should be considering why these things are even in your life.?

Now that you know how to categorise different tasks, I'll show how you can easily incorporate this into your life with the power of technology. Most people use a traditional linear to-do list for organisation but the problem with these is that you can’t rank tasks in terms of importance. This means that sometimes we can choose to do the easier tasks and the ones we prefer, then leave the harder tasks until the end where it’s easy to feel completely overwhelmed again, defeating the whole purpose of why we’re doing this in the first place.

To combat this, I use an online tool called Trello to organise my balls. In Trello, you need to set up three lists: Basketballs, Tennis balls and Ping-Pong balls… voila you’re all done! All you need now is tasks to fill your lists! Trello makes it especially easy to move tasks between lists and this allows tasks to escalate in urgency and importance so be very careful and try to deal with things on time.?

To get the most out of the system, I make sure that at the start of every day, I look at the three lists and depending on how long and what list a task is sat on, I decide what needs to be done that day. At the end of the day, I review the lists and remove anything I completed and add any new tasks that came up on that day. Of course, you don’t have to follow my exact routine but make sure to create a routine which uses this system, so you give yourself, and your team, the best chance to be consistent!

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