5 Ways to Get Better At Time Management By Understanding Your Brain

In the book named, Thriving in Mind: The Natural Key to Sustainable Neurofitness, the author (Katherine Benziger) suggested 5 ways to utilize our brain to make planning an easy task.

Our left posterior convexity (left back brain) specialized in processing names, definitions, data, and information.

First, know your strength and weakness by listing them out.

If you find that making a plan is very hard, then it is possible that you are not born with a superior left back brain. However, fret not as it can be done with a different method.

Second, accept the difficulty of doing the planning.

You have to accept this reality: There is a limit of activities that can be planned within one day. In my case, I always plan for 3 priority tasks that I need to complete. Except there is an urgent matter to deal with, I will stick to the plan to finish up the planned tasks. With that concept in mind, you will feel less stress as you have the control over the milestone.

Third, avoid extremist thoughts.

For those perfectionists or people who have OCD, they usually want their work to be perfectly executed according to the plan if not all will be wasted. Some may think every day should be well planned; if not, then don't plan at all. The suggestion for this is to take every small step as an advancement. Every effort put into the work should be counted. This will help to build up our resilience and when things go south, we will not blame ourselves too much. On the other hand, we can recover even faster.

Fourth, rather forcefully follow some preset plan, why not customize one yourself?

If you are a visual person, make colorful tags and put it on your info board. If you are an IT savvy, maybe try using Excel to make list and plan. If you love the easy going style, take a piece of paper and write down the to do list. All these tools help to make a clear direction for us in daily life chores. From this little steps, imagine there is an ultimate big goal, and each milestone is 1% completion and nearer to the goal. Most importantly, find a suitable planning strategy for yourself by keep experimenting.

Fifth, if you happen to know someone who is good in planning and well organized, hook them up for a coffee talk.

Find out how they do it and their methodology. The mentorship will save you a lot of time.Lastly, three things to remember during planning:

1. Empathize yourself when mistake happened
2. Recover from distraction by finding the focus
3. Restructure your plan when new problem arise (like moving your today to-do-list to tomorrow due to an urgent event happen, it is totally fine)

Note: Hope these tips could help to better your personal planning skills. 

*This post is originally posted on my LinkedIn.