Time management

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (S. Dali, 1952/54)

You can’t manage time. You have to manage yourself.

I’m looking at a daunting week this week with personal, professional and school work. There have been some interesting articles that I’ve noticed lately on the topic of learning to manage yourself and how you live in time. I thought I would share one in case you feel like you’re drowning too.

3 Beliefs That Transformed My Work-Life Balance by Erin Greenawald for The Daily Muse via Mashable. All three of these I live by to a great extent. Unfortunately, when you are living like your head is on fire and your tail is catching it’s easy to forget.

1. Free time doesn’t have to be available time. Oh lord, this one kills me. Free time is so critical to your mental state (if for no other reason than to do your laundry), that you’d better schedule it with yourself or you will schedule it with someone else.
2. If it’s not on the calendar, it won’t happen. I live by this. If I am in a meeting and another meeting is scheduled, I put it in the calendar ASAP. If not, I won’t be there. It’s almost guaranteed that 10 minutes after I swore to heaven and earth that I wouldn’t forget to put it on my calendar, someone will walk up and want a meeting on the exact date/time I swore I’d remember but isn’t on my calendar. Guess what? I schedule the second meeting having completely forgotten the first one.
3. Sometimes my time is more valuable that my money. That sounds N-U-T-S but it’s true. You don’t have time to wash/dry/fold laundry? Drop it off for a couple of quarters a pound, pick it up when you are between meetings. Don’t have time to mow your grass? Pay someone to do it when you are at work/school. TRUST ME, it may be just the relief valve you need!!

There are so many resources you can use to help you manage your schedule. The Internet is chock full of them. The article above is a good start.

There are systems and gurus you can refer to. I’ve found a lot of success with Getting Things Done by David Allen, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, and – as weird as it sounds – FLYLady by Marla Cilley. I’ve come back to these again and again to tweak how I use the systems, and re-discover tips. Self-management is lifelong effort that changes and evolves as your life changes and evolves.

What are your favorite self-management systems you’ve used? What works for you and what just didn’t click in your life?

I’d love to hear from you.

-Tina

Social Media is a 24-Hour Gig. Can you hack it?

Courtesy under30CEO.com

You’ve gotta sleep sometime!

I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t be on 24/7. Since I can’t be the 24-hour-a-day Social Media Mama I’d like to be, I’ve found a couple of easy hacks to help me get the message out and stay engaged around the clock.

I’ve taken a tip from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. It’s the idea of putting all your big rocks (in this case, your message) into your glass (your schedule) before it gets filled with other stuff. Trust me, it will get filled with other stuff if you don’t take control of your schedule and get the important things scheduled first.

Since you have a finite amount of time, attention, and space to communicate in, make sure you have the important messages out there first. I do this by scheduling my posts at least a week into the future.

I figure out what is the most important message/s to get out this week and schedule those posts first, typically one post a day at different times. Those are my big rocks. No matter what goes on in the world, this is what must be communicated.

Then I have space in between those rocks. I can play in this space. This is where I bring in breaking news, polls, funny videos. I can engage fully and respond quickly when I’m not worrying if I’ve fully communicated my message/s. I can focus.

Zack Levine via HudsonHorizons.com

To schedule posts, I prefer HootSuite to any other scheduling options out there. It’s fairly comprehensive; you can schedule & monitor Twitter, FB, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress and others. It’s also easy to manage many accounts in one place. There is a free version for up to five networks. I highly recommend tinkering with it if you aren’t already in HootSuite. Of course, they do have an app for smartphones and tablets too.

I also use the smartphone and tablet apps for the various networks I’m on. So far, I’ve set my notifications only for retweets, shares, comments, new followers. This makes it manageable for me to respond and engage immediately without much negative feedback from friends and loved ones. (Stay tuned for my blog about monitoring digital media 24/7 while having analog relationships.)

What do you use to hack your social media posting schedule? Are you managing it all or crumbling under the pressure?

Speaking of being under pressure, enjoy this sweet video from the incomparable band Queen. Do you ever feel like this?

I’d love to hear from you.

-Tina