Here’s video number 3 in this series on time management. Today I’m talking about why knowing your values is crucial for good time management. If you missed the other videos in the series, you can find the first one here and the second one here. There’s a transcript of what I say in the video, with at least some of the ums and ers taken out (!) below. Edit: Vicki has now created a podcast episode combining her own tips with techniques contributed by some of her friends and clients – including some of these.
So tip number three: know your values. There are exercises you can find online, where you get a whole list of values, and you get to work out which are yours, if you’re not sure, James Clear, who has written a book called Atomic Habits, has an exercise on values on his website. Here’s a link. But I’ll just tell you quickly mine, so kindness, being with my family, creativity are three really important values for me.
What you do is you match your goals, to your values, so you might say, I’ve got a goal to start my own business, how is that going to match with my values? I’ve got a goal is to write a book, how does that match with my values? And you have to put the goals and the values together to make sure that your goals chime with your values.
How does that help with time management? Because then when I sit down and think, okay, what do I want to prioritize? Well I want to prioritize spending time with my family, because I’ve said that’s one of my values, but I also want to prioritize working on my book, because creativity is one of my values. So it really helps with prioritizing if you know your values and your goals and how they fit together.
So if you’ve been following along you’ve now heard my three top time management techniques! But the one that I always have to mention though – this is a bonus number four – is my Pomodoro. I absolutely love my kitchen timer. You can find out that the Pomodoro Technique by googling it. It’s Italian for tomato. You spent 25 minutes working and then have a break, essentially, but time yourself and you can’t do anything else during those 25 minutes and it really helps me to focus, and, you know, lots and lots of people use the Pomodoro Technique. If you don’t know about it, look into it, it’s great.
I’ve written more about the Pomodoro Technique in this post called How a Tomato Can Change Your Life.
Check out the next video in this series here.
My book on time management is here.
More soon. Until then, happy writing,
Louise xx