There are twenty-four hours in a day and seven days in a week. How are you maximizing your time? Managing time is an essential building block to enhance health and wellness. It is a skill that requires personal attention for appropriate application based on personality, lifestyle, and individual goals. Accomplishing more with less effort occurs through honing time management skills. Prioritizing, organizing, planning, and scheduling provide the framework for building the healthy habits required to achieve personal goals. Effective time management provides a sense of overall well-being and is easily applied to our four pillars of health. It places control over your schedule to balance work and life.
One of the top benefits of improving time management is its effect on stress. High levels of stress wreak havoc on health and negatively impact sleep. Prioritization is the process of organizing tasks in order of importance. A simple application includes establishing three top priorities for the day. This healthy habit helps accomplish tasks in order of importance and can be applied to work as well as personal time by designating two work priorities and one personal priority for each workday. Build on this habit of prioritizing sleep with a brain dump before bed to celebrate accomplishments and prioritize for the next day.
Organizational skills improve the efficient use of time and result in surprising health benefits. Clutter steals time and adds to frustration and anxiety. Start small with one area of focus to help declutter. A daily routine of putting things in their place helps keep the house in order and frees time on weekends to schedule more of the activities that bring joy and reduce anxiety. Including these movement activities in your movement menu helps add scheduled “exercise time” to your work week. Consider adding music to dance your way through cleaning the kitchen, making mundane chores more enjoyable while lowering stress.
Planning is the cornerstone of time management. Utilizing tools to facilitate planning depends on your personality and personal preferences. Written and digital options for planners improve organization and facilitate efficiency. Meal prep and grocery lists are the perfect application to hone planning skills while enhancing health goals. Meal planning based on your weekly schedule provides the structure for meal prep, prioritizing healthy choices, and decreasing temptations while in the grocery store and throughout the week.
The final piece to enhancing time management is the scheduling component. Scheduling all aspects of work and life ensures balance to build healthy habits through habit stacking. Sleep is the first area to build into your schedule. Research is clear that consistent sleep schedules lower stress and improve overall health, so set boundaries to protect your required sleep cycle. Habit stacking involves scheduling items that accomplish a health goal in more than one of the pillars of health. Scheduling a walk after lunch combines movement and nutrition goals, while exercises involving mindfulness and meditation added to a night routine can address movement, sleep, and stress management.
Invest in yourself by discovering the best time management strategies for your lifestyle. Which area of time management needs your attention to enhance your health and wellness? Reach out for a free consultation to discover how to apply these powerful tips and get back to the life you desire.