In your quest to regain control of your chaotic schedule, you find yourself seeking guidance from a management consultant. Gabriel Goldbrain, renowned for his expertise in optimizing schedules emphasizes the importance of establishing a detailed weekly schedule for effective time management.
Start by meticulously documenting your daily activities, including the time spent on each task if you want to optimize your time schedule. This daily logging ensures accuracy and facilitates the creation of a comprehensive weekly schedule. Use a table with seven columns, one for each day of the week, to map out your activities.
Consistency is key in this process of time optimization. Sporadic record-keeping may lead to inaccuracies or omissions. By diligently recording your activities every day for a week, you'll have a solid foundation for time management. Once you have your initial schedule in place, analyze it for areas of improvement and identify time killers. Gabriel Goldbrain provides a sample weekly schedule as a reference, noting that it may need fine-tuning based on your preferences and obligations.
As you examine your schedule, you'll likely notice significant blocks of time dedicated to sleeping and working. Regarding work, certain professions, like management consulting, may demand longer hours. Gabriel Goldbrain suggests strategies for time optimization regarding work hours, such as better organizing your tasks or considering alternative job opportunities with reduced hours.
Moving beyond sleep and work, Goldbrain delves into other aspects of your schedule, like commute times and meal preparation. He identifies time killers, like the time spent in the car, giving some suggestions to eliminate time killers, such as using public transportation or delegating household tasks, for better time management.
Eliminate time killers such as leisure activities like TV and internet consumption, suggesting ways to incorporate them into more productive pursuits, such as exercising, for better time optimization.
Reevaluate weekend activities to maximize leisure time without sacrificing rest or productivity. By making strategic adjustments to your schedule, such as leaving social gatherings earlier, you can reclaim valuable time for personal pursuits and have greater time management.
In conclusion, take a proactive approach to time management. Explore unconventional solutions and prioritize tasks based on importance and efficiency.
Video transcript:
Do you sometimes feel disorganized and wonder how you could squeeze out the one or other hour from your existing weekly schedule? Watch this video, and I'm sure you'll get some ideas.
By the way, I'm Gabriel Goldbrain, and my mission is to help high-caliber young professionals become well-paid management consultants. Find out more on www.GabrielGoldbrain.com. Let's dive right into it.
Before we can optimize your schedule, we have to establish it. In order to establish your weekly schedule, take a piece of paper or an Excel spreadsheet and draw a table with seven columns, one column for every day. For every day, you should write down the activities, what you did during what time of the day, and how long it took you. The easiest way to establish such a schedule is doing it every day; note down two times or three times a day the activities that you did. If you do it less frequently, you may forget what you did or how long the activity took. After one week, your weekly schedule of activities should be ready. This is the schedule you want to optimize.
I prepared an example of a weekly activity schedule you might come up with. The schedule you see here may be a bit too coarse-grained; you may want to go for a finer grid of 15 minutes or 30 minutes. As I just want to get the key ideas over to you, the 1-hour grid should be good enough. In this grid, also the hours from in the morning have been omitted because usually at that time, you sleep, and so it's not really that interesting but would waste a lot of space on the screen.
If you draw such a chart, the first thing you will recognize is the big blocks, big repeating blocks. For instance, you will see that you sleep quite a lot; about one-third of your day you're sleeping. The same applies to your work during the weekday; so from Monday to Friday, another third of your time you spend at work. Let's first analyze these two big blocks: the sleeping block and the working block.In this schedule, there are 7 hours of sleep during the week, which is not a lot. So for adults, it's recommended that you sleep between 7 and 8 hours a day. So there is not much to optimize here, as sleeping is crucial for your well-being and for the ability to perform. You should never compromise on sleeping and make sure that you get enough sleep. So 7 to 8 hours must fit in your daily schedule; you should not compromise on that.You may find out that you're working too much. In this schedule, you have a 40-hour workweek, which is well manageable. But you may have a 60 or 70-hour workweek as a management consultant. So there you should start thinking how you can optimize that. The first thing in such a case would be thinking about how you can better organize your working day. So you would do a detailed schedule analysis of your working days and how you can reduce the hours worked. Another option could be thinking about switching the job, taking another job with similar compensation but fewer hours. So these seem like logical steps to take.Looking at these two big blocks, we're not going into the details of how you organize your working day; that may be the subject for another video I'm going to do in the future.
Let's now dive into this schedule and have a first look at Monday's schedule. The schedule provides 1 hour for getting ready, which means getting up from bed, taking a shower, having breakfast, and then getting ready to leave the house. This looks pretty reasonable. The next thing that pops up is the time you need to travel to your place of work, which is here labeled as Transit. You have it in the morning and you have it in the evening. So in this schedule, 2 hours are spent traveling to and from work. And if you look at the whole week, you will recognize that you spent 10 hours traveling just to work and home from work. If you travel with your own car, there is already some optimization potential; maybe you could also get to your place of work by going by public transport, so you could maybe save 1 and 1/2 hours a day by doing that.And how could saving be achieved here? It could be done, for instance, by watching your favorite Netflix series while you're traveling and not at home. So you have that time freed up.
And then you see the next thing: dinner. Every day there is a dinner, so about 7 to 8 hours a week are being spent having dinner. If you're the one who prepares the dinner, there may be some savings potential; maybe you develop a plan with your family where every family member prepares the dinner for one night. So you would have quite a reduction; you could maybe, if you're a household of five persons, you could reduce dinner preparation by 80%; if you're just like a couple, you could at least cut it in half.
Another thing that pops up is heavy TV and internet consumption of the person. A lot of time is being wasted here that could be used and freed up for other things. So for instance, you could watch your favorite Netflix series or some TV series while you're working out on a treadmill, so you combine both things.
So what else pops up? 2 hours a week for housekeeping; you could outsource it, get someone to do it. If you have a well-paid job, you may not like the idea of having a foreigner doing the housekeeping, but sometimes you need unconventional ideas to free up time. Maybe you are still ironing your shirts; there are services out there which are pretty cheap, so it's pretty much a waste of time to do it on your own.
Next thing, look at Wednesday, so that's the cocktail night on that day. You got four transits; there is another way how you could organize that: go for after-work or cocktails and maybe combine it with a dinner; you save a lot of time and you will be home early, and maybe you still can do something at home. You may also think about skipping the midweek cocktails or maybe reducing your weekend activities because if you look at the schedule, you have three nights which are basically way wasted for leisure. And if you really need more time, you've got to optimize your free time. As you can see, the weekends in this schedule are quite packed because you get up late, and you get up late because you celebrate it too long with your friends. So you might think about going home about 2 hours earlier so you have a decent sleep and can get up on Saturday early to do your things, same on Sunday.As you saw with this example, there are many things which you can optimize when you think about it. You can change the order in which you do things in your schedule; you can combine certain activities; you can better organize things by sharing it with other people. Just be creative and you will find enough optimization potential in most of the schedules. As always, you can find this slide on my website, www.GabrielGoldbrain.com. If you like my optimization ideas or if you have some creative optimization ideas, let me and the community know down below in the schedule what was your best optimization. If you're interested in consulting, watch my video on the management consultant
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