Have you ever looked at your schedule and realized that it was pretty packed?  A client recently told me, “I scheduled 7.5  hours of tasks into a 7  hour day – and didn’t schedule any time for lunch, email maintenance, or productivity (or potty!) breaks.  Then, I got upset because I didn’t finish everything. That’s crazy, right?!”  Is this familiar?

Enter Julie Gray’s Time Truth:  Expecting yourself to do more in a day than what is possible will ultimately decrease your productivity.  

(Read more about my lessons from Julie and Denslow Brown here.)

Just because you schedule a 30 minute task into a 15 minute block of time doesn’t mean you’ll be able to actually finish the task in 15 minutes.  Instead, you add pressure and stress as you try to worker faster and faster and faster.  Which causes you to feel overwhelmed.  Which leads to fuzzy thinking.  Which leads to lower efficiency.

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And now the 30 minute task that you scheduled into a 15 minute block of time actually takes 45 minutes to complete.

What’s the solution?

Get real!  Start estimating the time it takes to complete your tasks.  Schedule each high value task into your calendar.

When you run out of time on your calendar, you must stop scheduling!

Now – you can evaluate with all the information in front of you.  Are the scheduled tasks the most important?  Do you have important tasks that aren’t scheduled? Should you swap out some tasks?  Delete some tasks?  Delegate some tasks?  Renegotiate the parameters of some tasks?

Once you realize how long tasks take – and how much time you  have available – you can start to make some choices.  You are now able to be proactive about how you want to spend your time, instead of being in a constant “catch-up” mode.

You can start to create a schedule that creates a feeling of ease instead of a feeling of stress! Would you like some support accomplishing your goals and reducing scheduling stress?

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