Time Management Strategy: Free Up your Mind and Reduce your Stress

Stress and tension reducing time management strategy. Your mind is like a computer capturing and storing data all day long every day. When you choose to store unnecessary data in your mind you’re just increasing your stress and tension. With the fast paced world around you, and all the demands you have each day give yourself and your mind a break.

Use a system outside of your head to capture all the important things. Each day you have things you have to do now, things you can do later, things you can do some day when you have time, and things you want to remember to do at some point and you don’t have any idea when that point will be right now. So much information. So many thoughts and ideas. It’s no wonder you’re exhausted and have a tension headache by the end of the day. You can take a gigantic burden off your mind if you’ll just allow an external system to track all this stuff for you.

Don’t read the word system and think big and complicated and hard to learn. That’s exactly what you don’t want. You want something simple, that you developed, and that you understand, and that you’ll be willing to use daily. The whole objective of your system is to have a place where you can logically store all this information outside of your head. Thus freeing your mind up from having to track and remember all these really insignificant things in the big picture of life. You especially want to rely on an external system if what you’re tracking is really big picture important.

What system should you use with this time management strategy? Start with something you’re very comfortable with, and something you can rely on no matter what. Electronic systems are great, but when your hard drive crashes, your data is corrupted, or you have a virus how will you retrieve this information. Use one main system to manage your time, and only one main system. It’s okay to have other systems that trigger reminders, but you want one system that you can count on to have all the information you need.

How do you organize all this time related information? Everything that is this week should go right into your calendar. That’s the easy stuff. You also need one central location where you put all your “not now stuff”, all the stuff you want to or have to do later and you don’t want to forget. When you’re developing your system you also want to think about being able to access your information easily wherever you are, so you can add things and check things off and verify that you have the information recorded.