Need more time? Start scheduling yourself like a pro and start doing more today!

I need more time, I am swamped and I need more hours in the day. As a work life balance coach I hear this all the time in my practice. It’s really common to feel as though time is flying by and you are literally running to catch up with it. Rushing around to finish projects, get dinner on the table or just trying to clean up the house before you need to leave the house for the day has become commonplace. I was thinking about this dilemma this morning and a thought struck me. Why don’t we run our lives like the pro´s. If we truly need more time then why don’t we just schedule it in and create the structures in our environments that help us to stick to that schedule?

Let me tell you a little story. I used to be an aesthetician in a salon many years ago. This was before my coaching days obviously. I was paid by the hour depending upon my productivity. This limited my income quite a bit if I didn’t manage to service a lot of customers in the day. It was also limiting because there was only one of me so as you can imagine I needed to find a way to do more services in the same hour without duplicating myself. This was easier said than done.

I am pretty stubborn though so within no time I had a plan a schedule and a method. Each service took a specific amount of time but some had areas of time where I was literally waiting while the clients had a mask on or were soaking. There were also other areas where I could claim back more time for instance by delegating the things that I didn’t need to do personally. The cleaning, setup scheduling, restocking and rebooking could all be done by someone else. By evaluating where I spent my time, what needed MY attention and training an assistant to assist me to do certain parts of my job the way I wanted them done I was able to increase my productivity by almost 40 %

Once the time was reclaimed I was able to take clients during the dead periods, the times when I would have been doing the mundane tasks and still schedule in lunch breaks. What this has taught me is that sometimes you need to treat your schedule as if you are getting paid by the hour because let’s face it you are. Whether you are on salary, commission or unemployed everything you do comes back to you one day. Like they say you get what you give so if you need more time, start scheduling yourself like a pro and start doing more today!

Drifa Ulfarsdottir CPC

The Work Life Balance Coach for high achieving and executive parents

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