Why Appreciating Your Wellness Will Make You Productive

    I have had another challenging week regarding illness. While the worse of the cold has passed last Sunday night, I did have a relapse, with more eye pain and continued coughing. On top of that, I got some kind of stomach bug in the middle of the week as well. In terms of productivity, I certainly struggled to stay on track, especially having eye pain meaning I really don’t want to use my eyes all that much so that limiting me to laying down and thinking and listening to podcasts, that’s about it.

    With two weeks of various illnesses and curtailed productivity in the books, I have learned to appreciate more the times I am feeling better. Even now I am beginning to feel better for the most part and things I have taken for granted I am not very grateful for. I also understand that it can be much worse. There are far worse illness like cancer, ALS, Leukemia, Stroke, and that is juts to name a few. All I can be is grateful to know that I am recovering and very soon I will be able t eat, see, walk, and live like I am supposed to be.

    With that in mind, this allows me to refocus on productivity. I will discover what I haven’t been doing when I was sick and will come to realize that certain things are not all that important after all. Being sick for an extended amount of time does allow you to refocus and reorder your priorities. This is the case for anything major in your life that alters your life. The best we can do with difficult situations like illness or any other tragedies is to reevaluate our lives afterwards and move forward from there. It is all the better we will feel when we are fully recovered.

BONUS: Productivity - March 20, 2004

Here is something I remembered writing in my journal 14 years ago when I was 16. As you will see, I have always had a thing for productivity and time. 

"Productivity and efficiency are important things. Fooling around at stores and malls or in your house should not be a part of your routine. You should always be making the most out of your time. There is never a need to just sit around watching TV. No one should complain about the lack of time because there is always a way to improve your time management. There is also so many more edifying activities that can replace time-wasting ones. If everyone would change their schedules for just a little more productivity, the world would be better off."

Keep in mind, this is before I worked any job and was in a relatively easy year of high school as well. This is before I experienced being crazy busy which pretty much started the next year in 2005 and have been going on quite consistently since then with a few breaks. The way most of our lives are today, it is actually quite easy to complain about lack of time, even with good time management!

How to Recover Back to Productivity After Being Sick

    For this past week I have come down with a very nasty cold, one of the worst ones I have ever had. With everything from sore throats, fevers, coughs, pain in the eye, headache, and loss of appetite. As of the Sunday night before this post goes live, I am just now finally beginning to feel better. In terms of productivity, something like this throws you way off track! I lost control of my schedule, to do list, and time budget. Depending on the severity of the sickness, you may or may not be affected depending on how bad your illness is as it could be a simple cold that you recover from in a day or two or an major injury or surgery that requires a lot of recovery. Below are steps you can take to get yourself up and running and back on track as soon as possible.

1. Reevaluate Your Position. Once you are recovered to a point where you can function on a normal level again, this is the time to take a look at where you are and what your priorities should now be on your path to get back on track. No matter how off track you have got because of this (or if you are like me this time, how much more off track because I was already quite behind before I have gotten sick). Do what you would do any other day once this is determined, set the priorities, make your schedule, and get yourself going!
2. Get Going! As I stated in my first point, getting going is the best thing you can do once you feel better. If you are anything like me, the moment you feel better is some of the best moments in your life, especially if it’s a bad illness. You have the things that you have taken for granted when you well and you can really appreciate your life with a tremendous sense of gratitude. Take advantage of feeling better again and have some of the most productive moments you can have!
3. Be Sure to Continue to Get Rest. Depending on your lifestyle, the reason you may have gotten sick to begin with was inadequate rest. I believe personally, this was the case for me this past sickness, I have had a few days in a row of not sleeping as much as I should and being stressed about various cares and concerns. It is definitely important to make proper rest a priority, even if everything is not done, because everything will never be done. One of the most difficult arts to master is the ability to stop doing whatever you are doing and get yourself to bed, and then actually quiet your mind down enough to fall asleep.

I wrote this post on Sunday night right before I went to bed, this has been a pattern the last couple of weeks because of being very busy and this week also sick. Part of my goals for getting back on track now is to get more posts written ahead of time and also to expand into other aspects for Time is Me, such as a podcast, developing products and services, and more. Please let me know if you have any feedback of topics I should discuss, services I should work to develop, anything I should improve upon or begin doingI want to thank you for being my reader, whether you there since my first post last year on July 3, or this is your first post that you reading.

How to Get Big Things Done the Small Way

    In a world where there are very large projects and many of them, in a world for people have hundreds of tasks and a ton of things to do, the question is how do we get it all done. As I have discussed in a previous post regarding priorities, it is not always possible to get everything done. This is when we do need to set priorities. This is also not always cut and dry; however, there are tasks that are quick and urgent and while there are large projects that are not urgent at the moment, but cannot be put off until the due date or even a couple of days before. 

    School is a perfect example of this. There are those assignments that are due the next day but are small and relatively quick. For example, a set of math problems to practice whatever mathematics studied in class, as a reinforcement. Then there are research papers, group projects, and final exams. These are all longer term commitments that cannot (or at least should not) be done the day or night before. A large project around the house, at work, or even leisure activities like reading a book are considered longer term projects. So, now that you have a large project on your hands, there are few to go about this

1. Take care of a few unrelated small tasks first. This could be anything that will get you moving such as going through a few emails, a quick chore like taking out the trash, or anything else that is 5 minutes or less. Do a few of these quick tasks first to make you feel productive and get a momentum going.
2. Break down projects into manageable tasks. One large project is very intimidating. This can cause you to procrastinate and not get it done efficiently, or at all if it is not extremely important. Let’s take cleaning the house as an example. For example, let’s say a room or perhaps a garage or basement has over 500 items in it that may belong to various people. This cannot be done in a day. Break it down to maybe either corners of a room, by person it belongs to, or whatever else is logical to the situation.
3. Plan in advance. Lay out your plan and make a schedule for what you will need to do. Back to the example of cleaning out your house, having the right people who need to be there to decide on their belongings, going according to trash schedules and donating to goodwill, giving away, and how to sort out the objects and where to keep everything flowing efficiently. 

    Sticking to smaller tasks will help you get what you need to get done effectively. This really does help me personally and I can attest to it. Although the total tasks for the day can frequently exceed 100, having them in manageable bites gives a clear picture of the project. As the common saying goes, “The longest journey begins with a single step”, accomplishing big projects is best done in small bites.

When to Spend Money to Save Time

    I have referred to in previous posts about the relationship time has to money, as the popular saying “Time is Money” says. The relationship with time and money is essential because pretty much dollar earned is with some kind of time investment. This is the case whether you work hourly, paid in salary, paid commission, even passive income is based on time spent at some time. Obviously, not every dollar is earned with the equal amount of time. Examples of when you spending money to save time are hiring someone to clean your house, paying for shipping, paying a delivery charge for food or groceries. There are steps to determine when it is a good time to spend money to save time. 

1. Determine Your hourly rate: It is easy to determine how much you earn per hour when you are paid hourly; however, determining that with other incomes can be tricky. This can be discussed in more detail in a later post on how to calculate what your actual hourly rate is, because it can be tricky and is up to you on how much detail you want to go into to determine. Once you have either an hourly rate or amount to work with that is at least a good estimate, you can move on to the next step.
2. Find out how much time you actually have. Use the method the that works best for you to do this. Personally, I recommend using a time tracker to track your actual time, and some sort of system to also keep a time budget. Using aTimeLogger, an app found in both iOS and Android, you can track all of your time and set up goals to either limit amount of time or to reach a certain point that you are reaching for.
3. Find out how much money you actually have. Keeping a financial budget is very crucial as well, and more commonly practiced. Just like a good time budget, a financial budget is built the same way, with actual being tracked accurately and completely and have a way to compare budget to actual. There are countless tools for this, so use whatever works best whether it’s a computer program, an app, Microsoft Excel, pen and paper, envelope method, coin jars, etc. The best system is the one that you find most easy to access and realize how much money you actually have.
4. Determine priorities. The step to knowing when you should spend money to save time is knowing your current situation. For example, do you find yourself not having enough time to clean your home? If that is the case, then the next thing to look at is your money. Do you have money that you are willing to spend to have this done so you can have more time for other things you need to and want to do. This method works in business as well and personal life. Taking an inventory of both your time and money and looking at them together is essential to realizing if it is worth it to outsource your activity to someone else to do. 
5. Make a decision and act on it. Your last step is to make the decision. Hire the extra person for your business, or pay someone to clean your house, or decide to shop from home rather than going to the store. Also take note, that most decisions are reversible and can be reassessed later on to see if the decision is still valid and necessary to change.

Remember that time is limited, you cannot make any more of it. Everyone gets the same amount of time in a day, you can’t inherit time or win the time lottery. Money is different, you can create more of it per the amount of time you spend on it (i.e per hour, per year). Since you can’t create time, you can “buy” time by paying for things that save you time. 

How Intentionality can save Time and Money

     Intentionality will help you be more productive. Doing things you schedule on purpose is very important to your productivity. Making a time budget or a financial budget for that matter shows some intentionality. Actually following it is what is more important. Being intentional does not only keep you on track, but will also save you time and money. Choosing to follow your schedule consistently and sticking to your schedule will allow you to save time because you won’t have to waste time deciding what to do. No matter if you keep an extremely detailed schedule minute to minute or a more general schedule, making a choice to focus on these things will end up saving time

You can save money as well with the same concept - first of all focusing your money on a budget, just like focusing your time will allow you to save more time. Being intentional with your money just like your time simultaneously is the ultimate goal. As you do so, you will save on both ends. Below are examples of how you can save time and money by being intentional

1. Combining Trips. I mentioned this in my previous post, doing so will save time and money and overall it can add a lot. Remember just saving 5 minutes three times a week can add up to 12 hours, $25 a month is $300 a year.
   
2. Working both hard and smart. Getting your job done more effectively will lead to good things. If you are salaried, you can lower the amount of unpaid overtime. if you are paid hourly, this doesn’t have an immediate benefit, but with both hourly and salaried, there will likely be a long-term benefit of increased pay for good work.
3. Most efficient ways to shop. You can save both time and money by setting up systems on how you shop. Finding out where the best deals ahead of time and doing  the research can save you a lot of money. Knowing where to find the best deals will save you time once you are familiar with the store and/or website. For those of you love to shop (I am not really one of them), remember this, saving money is only saving money if you need to buy what you are buying, otherwise, you are probably wasting money. This is the same concept with our time, saving time on something you don’t need to be doing anyway is probably just a waste of time anyway.

Money and Time have a lot of links together. That is why there is well known saying like “Time is Money.” The easiest way to quantify your time in a financial matter is take whatever your hourly rate is (or if salary divide annual salary by 2,080) and put a dollar amount to your time. Then you’ll see that Facebook, YouTube, any kind of TV just got more expensive. Of course this is not a literal financial transaction, but more of an opportunity cost concept. I will explore more of the relationship with time and money in future posts. Please let me know your thoughts.

Maximizing Your Mind Capacity

    Ever have so many things on your mind that you don’t know what to do next? Hundreds of decisions to make. Every decision has several options. We have all been there and it is in those times when we find ourselves not sure of what we should be doing and we end up not using our mind to the capabilities that we have. The brain has been researched and discoveries find that we have top to 2.5 petabytes of storage space (a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes), while the RAM of a brain is assessed at several gigabytes that can vary greatly but both figures are definitely estimates and not scientifically proven. With this known, it appears that our brain is more like a computer than I have previously thought. On that note, computers were developed based on the brain as our brains were obviously here first. My focus here is on working memory or RAM of our brain. This capability is more variable and can be developed greater, but even that topic alone is a separate post altogether. Below are five ways to improve your mind’s RAM.

1. Streamline your processes. Anything that you can do to make something more automatic frees up your mind from having to think about it. For example, I plan what I am going to wear the whole week at a time so I only think about it once a week rather than every day. Another example of this would be using a productivity program like Nozbe to schedule your tasks and make them recurring so they pop up when you need them, similar can be done on a calendar as well. 
2. Combine Trips. Having less destinations will save your decisions to make about which way to go and when to go. Planning trips and combining them like instead of going out just for breakfast and coffee, but also to the post office, bank, grocery shopping, or wherever you have to go if you go for these things. Going right after work instead of shopping home first or going while you are already out will save you time to think by just planning in advance. This will also save you time and money as well since you will be driving less and it will take less time.
3. Take care of yourself. Eat and drink healthier food and drink, get the proper amount of sleep, and getting the right exercise. This is not a health blog, so take note of what that exactly means to you and whatever causes your brain to function at its best. As you do this you will learn what works better for you and it will make a difference to how your brain functions. Caffeine helps me focus well, but again that affects everyone differently, but unless there you are very sensitive to caffeine, a good cup of coffee, tea, or a nice healthy Bai5 or stevia sweetened caffeinated drink is good. 
4. Exercise your brain. Play brain games that help improve your working memory. Do math tables, learn new words, solve puzzles, etc. There are plenty of physical products out there for this and just as much or even more apps, programs, websites, etc. 
5. Free up your mind at times. Take time off to relax and rest. You can’t keep going all of the time, when you do your mind gets tired out and so does your body and you are less effective. Take a walk, do something fun, listen to music, hang out with friends, read a book on a different topic, or do whatever you find relaxing.

Just another note on working memory is that it is different than storage space just like a computer. However, a computer does use RAM if storage space is filled which explains why a computer can run rally slow if the storage space is filled. I could imagine our brains may be the same way but really don’t know, just speculating with that. My long-term memory is exceptionally well, and I can recall what I have did on any given day in the past 15 years. However, my RAM is just about average, sometimes maybe even worse because I still have a little bit of the ADHD I had as a child. I do at times walk into a room and forget why I did, but that happens to all of us. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section and any and all suggestions that you have.

Links

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Time Budgeting for Organizations

     I earlier discussed time budgeting and it’s uses and practicalities. I have been time budgeting now for several years and it has been a very effective in my personal life. There are countless benefits to making a time budget for yourself and your personal life, that it is worth the time investment to make one. This is why it is valuable in organizations as well. A time budget can fit into just about any organization whether it is a workplace, sports team, volunteer or religious organization. Just like the personal time budget, it can be for specific activities or any and all activities, and for whatever specific periods of time that makes sense. Here are five of what is countless amounts of benefits for time budgets.

1. Time Budgeting makes individual team members more productive. This is especially effective in training and planning with new employees. This gives a clear guideline on how long tasks should take and also can be adjusted accordingly as the tasks and position grow and develop
2. Time Budgeting can give each team member a guideline. It is easier to see how any given team member is dong in comparison to their or the company plan.
3. Time Budgeting can measure performance. In any situation where the team member/employee’s performance needs to be measured based on the time budget vs actual time spent this can be valuable. This can be helpful in providing incentives for goal setting for a certain task whether to do more of or to limit.
4. Time Budgeting works great in conjunction with a schedule. Time Budgeting can be done along with a schedule. If there is a schedule already being made than it is easy to couple that with the time budget aspect, especially using the right program. This can even done in Excel and there are a few good Excel templates that can be shared for this.
5. Time Budgeting is flexible. The best way to make time budgeting work is having it tailored to the right person the right way. With the amount of flexibility involved, there are several different ways to make an effective time budget and it comes down to the one that you need at the time.

    Time Budgeting has been helpful in my personal life as well as on my in my job. It is something that is great to start and then build upon and improve as you go on. My time budgets have evolved and changed over the time and so will yours.

Related Posts

Make a Time Budget

https://www.timeisme.com/blog/2017/7/17/make-a-time-budget

Why Overscheduling Your Team is Detrimental

    We all have different work sitautions. Some of us work for someone else in the form of a job or even as a consultant or in some temporary basis. Others work for themselves completely. You may be part of a team working for someone else or may have your own team. You may be working in someone else’s team and have your own team as well at the same time. Either way, at some point in your life you will either have had a team or been the manager of the team to some extent. As the manager, you need to understand the individual members on your team and what they can handle. This means knowing their strengths and weaknesses as well as the the level of workload they can handle. While not only on the individual level, you need to also ensure that there is enough people on the team to carry the workload and also in more rare cases, not too many people on the team to waste time and efficiency as well. It is also possible to have an unbalanced work load on the team Here are five reasons scheduling your team is detrimental.

1. Overscheduled team members get overwhelmed. This one is the most obvious. Anyone who is overwhelmed automatically is more concerned with how they are going to get everything done and how stressed they are more than actually getting things done. Everyone reacts to stress and overwhelm differently, but it’s never a positive experience for the team member or anyone else around them
2. Overscheduled team members can spread negativity. Someone who is stressed out and is working with other people will tell them that they are stressed. This can have serious consequences on the team morale, not to mention make your job as the team leader more difficult as well. 
3. Overscheduling your team can lower morale. Everyone will react differently, but overscheduling or placing too many demands on the team, especially for an extended period of time can lower morale. I know from personal experienced when working in jobs where everyone who is overworked is usually not a happy place. This is still the case, even the employees are paid enough. 
4. Overscheduled teams have more tension. There is more tension when everyone is stressed and trying to meet deadlines. This leads to all kinds of potential problems, that go beyond people getting stressed or overwhelmed. This can also result in tensions within the team and all kinds of other factors like arguing, bickering, and finger pointing. This can result especially if there is pressure on the team and there are mistakes being made.
5. Overscheduling your team comes from a mindset of overscheduling yourself. One thing to remember if you do have a team and you are the owner or the manager, is that you have a higher stake in the results than they do. You cannot have the same expectations on them as you do them. If you are the owner, you are going to have more on your mind than they do and you should, since you take the profits rather than just a paycheck. If you are the manager, you are taking a bigger paycheck than the team members most likely. Also, beware that if you have a habit of overscheduling yourself, the same things can trickle down to your team even if they are not themselves. They can pick up on your vibe of always rushing to get something done.

Just like anything else, there is a balance to finding the best way to manage your team. There are many factors outside of just making sure they are not overwhelmed. There are times where the workload is just that much or the funds or too short to keep enough on the team. This should be the exception rather than the rule. I have personally seen environments where everyone is overworked for whatever reason and the turnover was high. When it is a year or more of being overworked, people typically get more upset and less patient, but just as I said earlier, everyone is different. Some people are not as concerned with being overworked as other aspects. This is not a science and is definitely very situational

Priority Problems

We all have problems. We have problems of all kinds and varieties-some small, some large. Either way we want to find solutions to the problems that we come across. Just like the problems, the solutions may be simple or complex, or in steps. We need steps to solve the problems we have. We need to have priorities in order to solve the more complex problems and situations in our lives. We also need priorities in general for our schedules, budgets, goals, and to do lists. With a complex world and busy lives that we live, it is easy to have problems setting priorities or have them, but out of order. Below are just a few signs that we have priority problems.

1. We don’t have any priorities. This is not as obvious as it sounds. There are times when we just don’t set priorities. We do whatever comes up at the moment or whatever we want to do at the time. This happens when there really isn’t anything much to do, which can happen at some time in anyone’s life. Also, it could happen if we are just busy and are running around putting fires out, dealing with emergencies, and possibly saving the world without any plan. Good luck with that.
2. We have too many priorities. This is the opposite problem. We sit down and plan and we find out how busy we really are and make everything a priority! We have long to do lists with 100+ items on the priority list. Think that is extreme? It has happened to me before. I quickly realized that out of the 100+ priorities, there are only about 20 really good items that were true priorities at the moment.  It all comes down to this: we can only do one thing at a time. So determining how you view priorities is important. This leads to my next point.
3. We misdefine priorities. We fail to determine what an actual priority is. We may make something a priority that really isn’t. It may need to get done, even the same day, but is not the priority at the moment. There are many ways to view our priorities, whether it is on pen and paper, on a word document, in Excel, in a task management program like Nozbe or any of the other task/project management programs out there. Whichever method we do use, we need to develop a system to track actual priorities.
4. We don’t actively monitor our priorities. The actual frequency will be best determined by you, depending on how much work you have to do and what kind of pace your to do items come in. In an environment with a lot of urgency, it is best to view priorities at least every day, probably more than once a day. In a more relaxed environment, maybe once a week is enough. 
5. We over monitor our priorities. When it comes to the point where determining our priorities is the top priority, then there is a problem. It is possible to get caught up in doing the priorities so perfect that we waste more time doing that than anything else. It is important that we don’t spend too much time setting priorities to the point that we lose time and end up not getting the priorities we are setting actually done!

There are all kinds of problems we can run into while trying to solve the problems. With practice and determination, we improve at picking our priorities and getting our tasks done in a way that is efficient and effective. Those are just a few pitfalls. Please let me know your thoughts and experiences with finding your top to dos of the moment.