5 Time Management Tips That Actually Work for Busy Women

Today, I want to take a few minutes and share with you five specific tips on how I plan and manage my time. Hi, there. My name is Megan Sumrall. I am a planning and productivity expert for women, and I am on a mission to bring work-life harmony into homes all over the world, and I do that through my proprietary planning system called the TOP Framework. TOP stands for Time Management, Organization, and Productivity. If you want more information about that entire program, you can head over to thetopprogram.com. But today, I want to break down five specific tips all around time management that I've been using for years and can make an absolute difference in anybody's life. Tip number one, and is the most important thing, is to stop doing daily planning and lean into weekly planning. If you are still using one of the planning tools or planning systems that has you waking up every day, doing a brain dump, identifying your top three, and operating in a daily mode of living, I promise you this, you might get stuff done, but you are going to stay very reactive. You're likely going to get behind on those long-term projects or goals, and you are likely going to spend the better part of every morning rewriting the stuff that you didn't get done yesterday. Daily planning does not give you the space to absorb uncertainty, and it keeps you stuck in reactive mode. So tip number one is to embrace the idea of creating a weekly plan, more of a seven-day window. Tip number two is very subtle, and as soon as you hear it, you're going to be like, of course, but it's probably not on your calendar today. And tip number two is around what you do any time an appointment or commitment lands on your calendar. Perhaps you are invited to a meeting at work, and it shows up on your calendar, and the meeting is from 9 to 10 a.m. Or maybe you schedule your annual well check, it's at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and it shows up from 2 to 2.45 on your calendar. Any time a commitment lands on your calendar, you need to go back in and make sure that you are blocking the full amount of time that commitment takes. So let's go back to the two examples I gave here. Number one, maybe that meeting that lands on your calendar from 9 to 10, but there's always the expectation after the meeting that maybe you capture notes and send out follow-ups, and that takes you 15 minutes. Well, as soon as that meeting lands from 9 to 10, you should be going in and blocking off from 10 to 10.15 on your calendar so that you don't get booked for something right at 10 o'clock, and now you're scrambling to really finish what needed to be done for that commitment. Now with the well check example, maybe that's at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, but you need to leave at 1.30 to get there, and you also need another 30 minutes to get home on the other side. Rather than only capturing 2 to 2.45, you want to capture from 1.30 all the way to 3.15. This is what ends up where people feel like they're scrambling and back to back to back is they never go in and block that full time between commitments. Here's a little pro tip. Whenever I am booked for a meeting, I like to go in and protect 15 minutes of time before or after it so that I am never going back to back, and it gives me the breathing room that I need to get that transition time. Let's move on to tip number three, and this is going to be very different than what you're used to hearing from productivity experts. Once my commitments are in my calendar, because those are usually booked ahead of time, before you start layering all the things that need to get done that week, my third tip for you is to prioritize and protect personal time, and yes, you should have some form of that every single day on your calendar. This is especially true for women. If you leave it to the end and say, I'll fit it in once I've done everything, this is why you likely aren't getting any personal time. Now this doesn't have to be something huge. It could be as simple as truly taking a break at lunch, sitting outside and enjoying it, going for a walk, reading a book, relaxing after dinner before the nighttime craziness begins. But I always make sure every single day I've got at least one 30-minute block of time that's protected for me, and when that time comes, I get to go enjoy it guilt-free. Tip number four. This is a way I want you to really start reframing how you're thinking about the stuff that typically lands on your to-do list or into your plan. There's essentially two types of tasks that we are going through all day long. Type number one is what I call recurring tasks. These are the things that you do on a regular rhythm, you know, maybe every single day, every single week, every single month. Perfect example, checking email. That's a recurring task that you're likely doing every day. I personally have three times a day where I go in and process and check my email. Now maybe you have tasks that need to be done weekly, such as writing a report, getting a newsletter done, doing your grocery shopping, okay, both personal and for work. Category one are these recurring tasks that are done on a regular cadence. Category number two is the one-off things. The things that show up, you do once, they're done, and they're not happening on a regular rhythm. Now the reason I'm bringing this up as number four is having a clear distinction between recurring tasks and one-off work really helps you start to lean into the opportunity of creating routines around your recurring tasks. If you know that there are certain things that you need to do every day, such as maybe checking email, maybe you are in an environment where you use Slack or DMs or whatever that is, what this can allow you to do is to say, okay, if I know I have to do this every day, could I build a routine where I could get in and out more efficiently, set up scheduled times to do it so that I'm not being pulled in 20 different directions all day long? When you start to think about the work that you're doing under that lens of, is this recurring, right, is this something I do on a rinse and repeat, or is this a one-time, this gives you that next step now to be able to go in and starting to create routines around those recurring tasks. So I would encourage everyone today, especially for the things that are done daily, make a list of what are those things that you spend time on every single day and challenge yourself to see, is there a place where I could create a mini routine, meaning I do these tasks in order every single day, that would allow you to get more efficient with your time? Now the fifth and final tip is this, and this is one that is really hard for people to get their head around. Once you've leaned into tip number one, which is weekly planning, it means that your calendar is going to hold everything that you are planning on getting done in the current week. Now of course, life happens as you are going through your life, right? New things are going to be coming in all week long. You need to set up one central place that you dump all future work into, meaning stuff that lands in your lap this week, but you've said, I'm not doing it this week. It doesn't have to be done this week. This is something I'm going to be doing in a future week. All of those things competing for your time in a future week need to be housed in one central repository, right? So many people today have this information in so many different places. They have some of it in their email, oh, I'm not going to get to this this week. I'll wait till next week. I'll just leave it in my email box. Maybe it's in your Slack channel or your DMs. Maybe you've got some of it on your notes app. Maybe you've got some of it in a notebook. Maybe you've got some of it on a Post-it note and some of it in your car or an audio message, right? This is why when you're sitting down to try and plan your future week, it feels so hard because you have to look in multiple different places to say, okay, what are all of the things that are competing for my time this week? Now I like to call this my master backlog. The backlog is simply this. Everything competing for my time that's not currently scheduled in my plan for this week. So as those things start landing all week long, they get funneled into my one central master backlog. This is what allows me to, when it's time to plan the next week, go to one central place that says, here's everything competing for your time this week, Megan. And now I get to make intentional choices about what gets put into my calendar. Those are just five basic time management tips that will help you start to get a framework in place to take back control over your time in your calendar. Thanks so much. I'll see you back here with some more future tips.