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Hey everybody, it’s Adam with Productivity Academy here for a quick pre-Thanksgiving Productivity Academy Q&A. Today I’m going to be covering Best Time Management App and how to manage time to get more done and still enjoy things like traveling. Real quick, if you haven’t you can head over and click on subscribe if you’re watching this on YouTube, stay up to date. If you do that you’ll just get notifications when new Q&A’s like this are posted, new app reviews, anything like that. It’s an easy way to stay up to date. On Facebook you can obviously check out the page and join our Real World Productivity Group which is just now getting started. Going to be having some more information coming up on that so I’ll toss the link in for that.
All right, and before we get started too I wanted to mention something that’s really important. You’re watching this on your phone and on your PC at home on one of many devices. Something that’s coming up in the US if you’re watching this in the United States, it’s really important, is the vote with the FCC over net neutrality. This affects just a lot, I don’t want to go into it here. It even has some political issues that I really don’t want to touch because that’s not what I deal with here but I think it’s a very important issue that people need to be aware about, that this vote is going to take place. That basically there’s rules being tried to be forced through that will negatively impact our ability to view what we want to view, how we want to view it, when we want to view it. I’m including the link here. Please at least check it out so you’re aware of this and if you feel compelled to please take action against this so that we can maintain the internet as we know it.
All right, so getting back into it the very first question that I wanted to talk about today, is mention what is the Best Time Management App. I think that this is a really good one because this is something, to be honest, that is fairly recent for me. Until two years ago I think I hadn’t ever tried to actually track my time in terms of saying, “I’m going to take a week and go do that 30 minute breakdown of what I do.” As far as an app, I’m going to kind of take this in a different direction and say the best one is a piece of paper or whatever you’re using for your journal for your daily to do’s.
Go through and for at least a few days if you can do it for a whole week track out your time first. I think that that is much more effective for several reasons. One, it’s forcing you to think about it instead of I know there’s several apps that can pull in what websites you’re visiting, where you’re spending your time. I think that’s interesting and could be useful but I think this, if you do it on pen and paper, forces you to be more aware of what you’re doing. Then, in my mind it’s also like studying. The reason a lot of times when you take notes, say during a class and why that’s even a thing that people do is because you can learn just by sitting there and listening and absorbing that information but by taking notes just helps retain that.
There’s all sorts of information that covers that. I won’t go into that but I will say that I think that taking your time down and saying, “Okay, maybe every few hours, like every four hours I go back and fill in for 30 minutes blocks, what was I truly doing? Did I spend 20 minutes of that on Facebook or looking at my phone?” Then from there go in and start using an app to help you manage your time because I think unless you’re fully aware of what you’re doing I don’t think it’s helpful to say, “Okay, well I’m going to block out my time,” but the if that’s not really how you’re using it then to me it’s much less effective.
All right, and then the second question for today, how do you manage your time wisely so that you are efficient in what you are working on but can also enjoy things such as travel? Great question. I think, again, this comes back to time management and planning so I’ll always plug doing a daily review. I think even when you’re traveling you should do this. For example, tomorrow I’ll be traveling for Thanksgiving or rather today I’m traveling, tomorrow I will be on the road at a different location, I won’t be at home. Same for Friday and then the weekend comes and what do I do?
Well, maybe I don’t do my full day’s work, I definitely won’t tomorrow, but I still sit down and maybe it’s at a slightly different time but I pull out my plan app, pull out my to do list and look over my calendar and make sure there’s no appointments that I forgot to cancel or there’s nothing sneaking up on me and go through the dance. Say, “Okay, you know what? I’m going to take an hour this morning before it gets hectic and I did have these two things I wanted to knock out. Maybe I meant to catch up on some reading.” Then go through and say, “You know what? Okay, the rest of the day is for what it needs to be for.”
Then when you’re traveling you can expand that idea and say a lot it you can plan ahead for that. “Hey, if I’m going to be traveling for a week or two weeks can I look at that and say okay, what’s realistic for me? Is it realistic that I work eight hours a day, five days a week? Probably not. Can I work 30 minutes a day?” Again, probably not realistic so figuring out what works for you and saying, “Okay, during the weekdays while I’m traveling I’m going to work in the mornings and put in four hours. I’m going to go and kind of sketch out how that looks and then the afternoons I’m going to know that those are mine.”
Then you deal with it as you go. Part of it is just doing this and saying, “Okay, now I traveled, what worked, what didn’t?” Incorporate that into the next one and iterate on that. I think sitting down, doing that daily morning review and then planning ahead before your trip and saying is this a realistic scenario will make it more enjoyable in the sense that you’ll actually get things done and then you’ll be able to enjoy that time. Where instead, you won’t be thinking, “Should I have been working during this time?” You’ll say, “No, I’d already thought about this. I’ve got my work done and I was focused highly for those few hours. Now I’m going to go enjoy my time while I’m traveling,” seeing sights, whatever it is you do.
Hopefully, that helps. I think that’s a great plan and definitely something you have to work on. I do have a friend and business partner of mine who does a lot of traveling so maybe I’ll have him on the podcast as well and we can talk to him about that. Now he manages that. I’m happy that I can travel for a week or two at a time, he can do months at a time and does that multiple times per year. If that sounds interesting to you leave a comment, let me know, I’ll try to get him on the podcast.
That’s it for today. If you’re in the United States I hope you have a great Thanksgiving tomorrow and travel safe, all that. Everyone else have a great rest of your week and I will talk to you soon.
