Effective Time Management  – How To Prioritise Time As A Coach Or Therapists

Why do so many people stress over time or struggle to create an effective time management strategy into their daily routine? 

Well, one reason is many of us rush through life with such a chaotic sense of urgency we make a lot of errors. We place so much importance in the future rather than on the present, we fail to prioritise time on the things that really matter.

While others suffer from self-sabotage and procrastination, they can waste endless hours avoiding things or focusing on the wrong things, this why effective time management life skills are so valuable.

Effective Time Management Skills – Urgent Or Important?

As Stephen Covey says “Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.”

Effective time management is all about prioritising time on the important things in your life and business. It very much requires the skill of discernment between what is regarded as urgent and what is really important, especially in the long-term.

When you focus your energy on the wrong priorities in your life, work, or business well the cracks really begin to appear. But how do you learn how to discern what is important and what is not? Especially If you are getting pushed in all sorts of directions in your personal, family life or career? Well, you need to find clarity and you can only find clarity in a more clear mind.

Unhealthy Habits Of A Distracted Mind

A busy mind is often a very confused, foggy, anxious, or stressed mind. This level of anxiety and stress can seriously influence your capacity to make healthy or wise choices. In-fact your mind’s need for escape will often look for some sort of escape, which is too often an unhealthy distraction and or addiction.

Just consider how much time many people waste every single day scrolling through fast feeds of pointless information on Facebook or Instagram. Or how much time we spend ruminating over what if’s or what has been. In-fact how much time do you waste faffing about unsure what you should be doing next, simply because you aren’t focused enough or organised enough?

Effective Time Management And In-Effective Time Management

I am someone when it comes to household chores, well I have to put my hands up and say I struggle to get organised. It is definitely not an area where my skills, expertise, or even desire to do well is.

But this is an area where both my sister and niece are great at. They both have great practical and organisational skills. They both have effective time management skills in these areas.

So every so often I hire my niece or ask my sister to help me get organised, because it not only helps me out but they get me so organised so quickly, it helps save me time and energy in the long-run.

Hiring someone to help you create systems in your business can save you a lot of time and money. Hiring someone to help you get more organised at home in areas where you struggle can make life so much easier.

Effective Time Management Software In Business

A lot of people around me comment on how much I manage to achieve in my business, around a whole host of neurological challenges and disabilities. But in my business, I use a lot of highly effective time management software and apps.

For example, I use some fantastic automated software for my social media. One is called Social Bee which is great at not just automating a lot of posts on different social media accounts and FB pages.

But it actually rotates different types of posts and content over a certain length of time. This saves me hundreds of hours in posting and scheduling. In fact, I use a lot of different tools in my business that save me time, energy and money .

Effective Time Management Skill For Every Area Of Your Life

But there is one time management skill that I recommend everyone learns to help them in every area of their life. A time management strategy that even children should learn and that is learning how to be fully in the moment. Babies and young children are actually naturally more present, more in the moment.

You may think being in the moment, or focusing in the moment is a strange effective time management approach. But being in the moment actually helps us slow down the mind. And in many ways when we slow down the mind we have more clarity, more focus, we make much wiser decisions and take more healthy actions. Full presence equates to full attention, we make fewer errors, make less knee jerk reactions when we are calm, relaxed, and in the moment. One of the reasons mindfulness and meditation has became increasingly popular with many people and many workplaces.

The Most Effective Time Management Strategies

What Is Truly Important: One of the most simple but effective time management strategies is to get a client to recognise what is really important to them. When challenged to see things from a different perspective, they see how much time and energy they spend wastefully. Often too much time or anxiety over activities that don’t really matter. Over just a few sessions; the international executive, the busy mum or full-time carer begins to prioritise time more easily.

Analyse How You Spend Your Day: Write down your typical daily activities or use a time management app to time how much time you invest or spend on different tasks or hobbies. This simple time management strategy can be a light bulb moment for many clients. They actually start to see how much time they actually waste between activities or how much time they spend on everyday distractions. Do you know how many wasted minutes and hours you spend on Facebook, Texting, or even Watching TV? Analyse those little distractions that have become large unhealthy habits, even addictions. And then see what simple changes you can make, for example switch off your phone, TV or computer off more.

Schedule In Your Priorities: Decide on the most important things, people, and events in your life. Then set a day and time for those important things, making appointments with the important people in your life, that date with your partner,  play dates with the kids, time for you. This will help you commit and focus on what matters. It is too easy to get caught up in filling our life with busyness but as Convey states. “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

Be Fully In This Moment: When you learn to be fully in each moment, time seems to almost stand still and stretch. Meditation is one of the easiest ways to help you be more in the moment. Meditation helps you feel more calmer and confident. When you meditate your processing and organisation skills become more guided by what is truly important. Meditation also has a powerful knack of giving us the right guidance and inspiration, which can include ideas on how to do things far more efficiently or simply. Meditation and being in the moment in-fact helps us slow down to speed up.

Creating A Life Of Balance – Effective Time Management

Managing your time, your priorities are all about balance. Every time you think you need to or must do this ask yourself does this really need to be done? Would this be important in an emergency? Is there a much better or happier use of my time? In business ask yourself what task is going to give me the most effective results?

Unhealthy Habits And Time

In life, we often do things the way we always have done them, we don’t question why we do something. We often learn to prioritize our time and our life to other people’s ideas of what is important. So a lot of what we think is important is actually based on someone else’s unhealthy or distorted beliefs, or habits.

Think about the things that were or are important to your parents, grandparents, teachers, boss that are now part of your main focus. Learn to question everything you have came to believe is a must.

Your priorities should be yours, they should be based on your values. In work yes you may have to prioritise your work tasks around others’ needs. But again don’t be scared to look out of the box, view  your regular routine and daily tasks from a different angle. It is always important to see if there is a better way a more effective time management strategy or tools that could help you. Asana or Trello are great tools to help with delegation and task management, toggle is a time management tracking tool.

If you would like to learn how to save more time so you can make money in your work, your business check out my Time Management Course For Coaches and Therapists see below.

Eileen Burns is a Stress Management Expert and Soul Empowerment Coach For Healers, Therapists and Coaches. Owner of Stress Coach Training, eileen has been studying healing, holistic and spiritual wellbeing for over 30 years. She provides a range of online cpd courses for therapists as well as one to one coaching and inner child therapy.