3 Things to Do to Organize Your Time

Create a plan that helps you have time to get everything done.

Busyness is out of control. During my 23-year career as a teacher, I heard all kinds of excuses about why students couldn’t do their assignments. Some excuses were better than others, but the one I heard most often was, “I don’t have time.”

As adults, we often make excuses about why we haven’t gotten something done, or can’t do something we are asked to do.

One of my professors in college, Dr. J. C. Hicks, once said, “If you want something done, ask a busy person.” What he meant was that a busy person, when given a task that must be done, will find a way to do it.

The trouble is that most people don’t know how to go about making time for the things that need to be done.

Anyone can learn strategies to get things done. However, most people don’t know where to begin. While it does take time, anyone can learn how to do it. Once you get the system set up, it is easy to keep it going.

When I taught a study skills class to middle school students, one of their first assignments was to make a list of everything they did during the day. The whole day must be accounted for. They logged every activity for a week.

Every time they started a new task or activity, they made a note next to the time they started it. They recorded when they got up, when they left for school, ate a meal, changed classes, and even went to the bathroom — everything. Then I had them use multiple colors of highlighters to categorize the activities, leaving pleasure activities unhighlighted.

For instance, they could highlight time at school in red, eating meals in green, homework in blue, and time getting dressed in yellow. They left everything they did for pleasure unhighlighted, including “talking to mom in the car”.

In this way, they could see easily where they might be wasting time or spending too much time doing something. They could also see where they could use time…

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