Hey everybody. This is NJ, the host of the NJ podcast, and this is five point Friday. This is part of the everyday series, where we share insights and inspiration in the form of five different points. This will be related to a topic that I can add value to you. Fridays is a great time to reflect on these topics because you're winding down from the week. Oh, you're getting ready to carry on. Grinding over the weekend is going to be a great time. And on today's show, we're going to talk about five points for better time managers. Time is your most important and valuable resource. You can never get it back again. Once it's been lost. If someone wastes your time for the first time, don't let the Mercer time for the second time, because you cannot get it back. They say that time is money, so don't let somebody else make you poor. However, the person who is more prone to make you poor is yourself because of the lack of time, effective time management strategies and in the world of project management and where I've worked and in life in general, at the time I have a very, very. Big appreciation for time because we waste time. And if we procrastinate on something, we don't know the effect, it will have on the outcome that we want to reach. Because if you procrastinate on something today, it can push your dream out five, six months, even if six months away or even a year. So make the most of your time investment and maximize the time. And here are some five points for better and more effective time matters. The first point is set reminders for all your tasks. Jim Rohn said, never rely on your memory. Life can get busy. We can have multiple tasks to handle and juggle simultaneously, and we can have a lot of things on our plates and our brain and our mind seeks efficiency. So we should. Aim to help our brains out as much as possible. So therefore we should set the reminders for all our tasks, uh, and Microsoft outlook, which is a very good, uh, email suite. That's out there. When you have a, a meeting, it can add a reminder will pop up 15 minutes before, or you can set to five minutes before the actual meeting, which reminds you, which can help you integrate. Oh, by the way, if there is that meeting that I need to attend. And then also, uh, when you have a toss it down and there might've pops up because you can get distracted. Life does happen. If you have that reminder, it serves to aid you to remember that there is this time task that needs to happen. So set a reminder for all the tasks. You can do this on your phone. You can do this on your laptop. And, um, this will be very, very. The second point is create a daily planner, create a daily plan about three sayings, about a day, a planet with the Churchill. He was a former British prime minister said plants are of little importance, but planning is essential. Yogi Berra is a former New York Yankees catcher. He said, if you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace. And then Alan legend is an author, said planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it. Now, a daily planner is exactly that it is a list of tasks and priorities and time limits for things you wish to get done the fact specific day. And you can create that. Online, you can create it on your, your, your daily planning journal. However, you need to take time 30 minutes before the day starts to plan out how your day will go. Because if you plan out your day is Matt is manifesting what is going to happen in the future. And if you have a daily plan and you are agile, It can make sure that you don't end up wasting time and allocating your resources and efforts to toss that were unplanned and are not urgent or are not important because you have a plan that's set up for the day. You've got the it. Quite the time that the task needs to be done, you've got the priority, things need to be done. And also you need to have the dependency, uh, and the dependency that, uh, is needed for the tasks to be completed. So create a daily planner and the daily plan. The key word in daily planner is daily something, a practice that you use every day so that you don't end up wasting time and you are a much better, uh, efficient in your time management and which you have a daily planner. You can say to someone who wants some time for me. If they want to set up a meeting for your two o'clock five o'clock and they say, do you have time without a Dave? Cannot. You can not really be genuine about whether you got time. Yes or no. But when you have a day, pat, you can say, I've got this appointment. I've got this toss to do between this time. And hence, I can accommodate you for X amount of time in the afternoon. It helps you to manage other people's expectations, helps you to manage yourself. And more importantly, it allows you to know what to say. No. The third point is give each task a time limit, give each task a time limits. Joe L. Griffith said a goal is nothing more than a dream with a time limit, how it starts. The penalty for exceeding the time limit is a forfeiture of the game. If you have a time limit to a certain task, it sets a certain sense of urgency to completing the task. If you S uh, An hour to setting up meetings or planning ahead or creating the report, or may doing your sales call and allows you to focus and zero in for that hour or two hours or 30 minutes, whatever the time limit is to focus on that task and to say at the end of the time limits. And I move on to the next task. What that allows you to do is to focus it zero in and work with a sense of urgency. If you don't have a time limit to something, you may be more nonchalant and more casual with your time, and this will be. A way that you end up losing time. So set it time limits for your task. Time notes are important in football matches basketball games that are in importance in all your major sports events. Why? Because. Good within the time limits, you can be the most effective person. So be sure to set a time limit and instead of realistic time limit. Okay. And so if you set a time limit, you can also take a retrospective to say it took me five minutes or even an hour to get this task done so that when you do your forward planning and you just do the task again, you can say it took me an hour in the past to do this, to do this task. So it's going to take me an hour. Or I've become more efficient at this task. I can now scale it down to 45 minutes. 30 minutes allows us to do that. Uh, for planning allows us also to take a good retrospective. So setting a time member to each task is fantastic. The fourth point on how to better manage your time is to block out distractions. Tony LA Russa said there are always distractions. If you allow. The best way for you to block out distractions is to know what is important and what is not important, and what will divert your focus from the end goal. I heard of a, an employee who was so focused and so zeroed in on their tasks that anybody who came up to them to say, uh, you need to, uh, to. Over like over the water cooler gossip or just coming to distract them. This employee would say, listen, you're ruining my career. I'm trying to get ahead. I'm working on something or speak to you later. Go and ruin someone else's career, not mine a bit harsh, but I understand what they're saying. You stop other people, put the boundary and pesticides. Don't distract me while I am watching. In other ways you can block out your distraction is to put your phone on. Uh, turn off the notifications and, uh, close all tabs that are there set a timer. And, uh, when you're doing the task and then just really focus in and zero in on it, on your door or on your cubicle or wherever it is that you're working, put a do not disturb sign, uh, all and classic. But it does just say that for the next couple of hours, I do not want to redistrict it. Clear up your environment, make your show. Your environment is clean, put some audit to your environment. So it will block out the distractions that are there. It's difficult to do so, but it's very important to maximizing your time investment. The fifth parts and how to better manage the time is to establish a routine. John C. Maxwell said, you will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. This means doing certain things over again at a certain time, waking up at the same time, the best. Wake up at 5:00 AM. Then they join the 5:00 AM club exercising at a certain time, eating at a certain time, having certain key meetings at a certain time of go to sleep at a certain time. And if you have, if you get into the routine of writing for a set number of hours or performing a certain craft at a certain time for a certain amount of hours, and you get used to having your body and your brain be more efficient, that's when you stop wasting time. Because if your. And your day is half hazard. We don't have a set routine for certain things. I know things are agile. Things can change, but if you have a surgery team for certain things like waking up at a certain time, go to sleep at a certain time, eating a certain times and doing certain things at a certain time and building that routine and making sure that you're doing the most effective task during that routine, you can better manage your time. I hope that you enjoyed this episode of five point Fridays, where we talked about how to better manage your time. As we talked about, the five points are set reminders for all your tasks. Create a daily planner, give each task a time limits, lock out distractions and establish a routine. If you enjoyed this episode, please like share comment and subscribe. If you're interested in any books, I mentioned us, please head over to the websites. Let me know which of these five points you think are the best time management strategies that you can employ. Have a fantastic Friday. No. How to use this five points, a better time management time is your most important resource. And I will see you on the next episode.