“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.”

– Harvey Mackay

From what Mackay said, it implies that time is the only essential element that could either make or break your personal life and professional career. If you are unable to use your time wisely, you will likely to lose track of your own life and fall to the ground of failure. Meanwhile, on the other hand, spending time to do things that matter the most will change your life all at once.

According to Activia Training, organising, managing, and scheduling the daily time you spend at work is vital. It has huge impact on your performance and productivity. It can also make you a more efficient employee as it helps you meet deadlines, produce better quality work, as well as encourage to develop yourself. Not only will it give you an applause of improvement in your career and, probably, private life, scheduling your time will also help you eliminate procrastination, reduce stress and anxiety, and make better decision. Below, we have listed five points on how to schedule a better timetable.

See also: How to NOT Bring Your Bad Day at Work to Home

01 Identify available time for your work

You have approximately 24 hours a day, or 168 hours in a week. People commonly spend about 8 hours at work, meaning that you need to do your daily and weekly tasks in a very minimum hour. Therefore, you should identify and schedule your tasks. For example, at what time you should learn, relax, work, and do other activities such as eating, taking a bath, washing dishes, etc. Additionally, if you are a 9-5 employee, it will be easier for you to identify it as you will spend most of your time at workplace. However, you should still use your weekend time wisely. You might want to consider using time management tools.  

02 Schedule your high-priority activities

As an office worker, your priority should be the job itself. However, there will be many part of jobs you should do such as meeting with clients, discussing project with co-workers, completing daily report at work and many more. In this case, planning your tasks from the most important to the least ones will help you finish all errands in certain period of time. This point is helpful for you who does not have secretary or someone in desk to schedule your daily working hours.

03 Schedule essential actions

The difference of high-priority activities and essential actions is that the time needed to complete these two things. While high-priority can be your whole work or project, essential action is action needed to finish the project. By organising your actions, you will likely to finish project earlier as long as you follow your track of time.

04 Schedule some extra time for emergencies

Emergency is an unexpected thing that might occur at anytime anywhere. Hence, appropriately schedule your time for unexpected activity will keep you in track.

05 Analyse your schedule and activities

Lastly, take a look again at your schedule and activities. You should reschedule or rearrange your time especially if it does not give enough break time to relax. For example, are they really necessary to be completed today? Should you eliminate some of them? Are they already in the right priority order? Many studies found that by not having enough time of relaxation, you will likely to lose control of yourself which often lead to decrease in working performance and, in some cases, serious health concerns such as anxiety, insomnia, and depression.

Briefly, if you have an overwhelming project, it is necessary to find a solution such as organising or breaking them into smaller task. Needless to say, scheduling your day-to-day daily activity will also help you organise your thing. Therefore, it is important to analyse your schedule and activities before you apply them. After that, you should repeat and make it as a habit. You can set schedule for a week or a month ahead to help organise everything in your life and have better work-life balance.

Read also: Why Feedbacks from Boss or Co-worker are NOT “Always” Effective