How can you become a true expert at handling your most precious resource your time? By creating an easy-to-follow Time Management Personalized system one that efficiently meets your unique needs and lifestyle. Our current blog series covers the best practices in Time Management to enable you to start maximizing all available hours in your working day. Time Management Personalized will help you tailor time to your unique needs. Follow these practices and you are sure to simplify your life and reduce stress. What are the best ways to manage your time? Begin with 3 simple steps. Step #1: Discover Where Your Time Goes You must know where you are to determine how to get to where you want to go.
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Among the top reasons why people are chronically stressed is feeling they have too little time for everything that needs to be done in a day. In a previous blog post, we touched upon the reality of the overworked adult in America.
INTERNAL LINK to the first post Overwork is often the result of poor time management because, let’s face it: things can get out of hand very quickly if you don’t really know how you’re spending your time. So your first step in Time Management Personalized is to become completely aware of how you are spending your time every single day.In order to accomplish this, you must create a simple time log. Start recording your activities from the moment you wake up until bedtime. Include the time spent on each activity. Do this for at least 2 weeks, so you can observe the average trend for different activities. Any person can become more efficient using their time when they log their activities. This is personal task. Make sure you give yourself a realistic tally of how you’re spending your time on a regular day. Perhaps you’re spending 8 to 10 hours in the office. Yet, if you’re barely coping with the workload, it’s possible that you’re not making wise use of your available time. In addition to recording your activities and the average amount of time spent for each activity, I want you to honestly rate each activity from 1-4. 1 = “a waste of my time” 2 = “a little time consuming” 3 = “a good use of my time” 4 “an excellent use of my time” Within a couple of weeks of journaling and recording your daily activities, you will see a detailed picture of your actual use of time. You will notice patterns. The information that you get from this exercise is a foundation for improving your time management, simplifying your life, and reducing stress. Your time log will help guide future time management efforts. Step #2: Start Transforming Your Activities Poor time management is often the result of having too many unnecessary activities throughout the day. Some of these activities, such as watching TV, may not be completely harmful. Nevertheless, you must monitor your viewing time.Now ask yourself: Are you frequently missing deadlines? Are you extremely stressed about having insufficient time for all the things you want to do? Yes? Then there’s definitely something wrong with your selection of activities. Transforming your daily activities is actually quite simple. First, you need to write down all the things for which you need additional time. Don’t hold back when making this list write down anything that comes to mind. My first list actually looked something like this: – Rediscover spirituality – Learn how to play chess – Read more – Spend more time playing with the kids – Play some video games Re-do this list My list may look meaningless to some of you, but it is a genuine list that I made a few years ago when I was becoming severely burned out by my work.However, I succeeded in turning things around. How? By creating a Time Management Personalized log to identify the activities that consumed too much time. When I realized where my time was going, I was able to cut corners.
Eventually, I was able to make time for all of the things in my initial list and even more!
I can confidently say that you can replicate my results by simply being mindful of all your activities INTERNAL LINK and by asking yourself if you really need to spend time on the activity at all.
If you become more mindful of where your time is going, then you will easily be able to remove common distractions INTERNAL LINK from your list of routines.
Step #3 Change How You Do Things
If your days are filled with activities that are essential to your work or family life, yet you’re still falling behind, then you need to change how you do things.
Again, this is Time Management Personalized. The way you decide to change your approach to accomplishing your obligations and responsibilities can reduce the time you spend on each task. This will effectively give you more time for additional activities or even leisure.
EXAMPLE: How many times do you check your email every day?
The average person checks their email about 15 times per day. But a recent study from researchers at the University of British Columbia found that when people were limited to checking their email just three times per day, their stress levels decreased significantly.I met someone who admitted that he checks his email every hour. Now, assuming that it takes about 10 minutes to open your email and scroll through messages, that’s already 60 minutes gone in a day after the sixth visit to the inbox. Think: You’ll never get that time back!
There is a remedy for this trend: Limit the email checking to once or twice a day. Urgent emails do demand attention. But on an average day, a person should not be preoccupied with checking his email.
Instead of filling empty moments checking your email, make a habit of either skipping it or substituting a more constructive activity that will support the list you made in Step 2.
The Takeaway:
Assess your current use of time with a written log. Transform your daily activities to fit a schedule. Alter the way you accomplish tasks to streamline work efforts.
As you are getting underway with these practical steps, you’re ready to proceed to a simple, time-tested method that automatically puts your day in order. We look forward to sharing it in Part 2 of our series on Time Management. INTERNAL LINK
A Majority Of Americans
A majority of Americans today would agree that “institutional racism has existed since the colonization of the Americas”; slavery and segregation in the form of Jim Crow laws are prime examples. However, many Americans today believe that we live in a “post-racial society,” especially following the election of our first black president. The biggest questions to ask these people are, when did it end? What policy was completely effective in doing away with white supremacy in America? In order to truly and fully understand how we, as white Americans, can consciously ignore modern systematic racism, we must understand the ideology of “colorblindness” in America. (Dolezal, 2018)
Adopting a colorblind ideology completely eliminates the concept of race. However, for many people of color, race is very much a reality. Talking about race is important because if we don’t, it’s as though we’re pretending that slavery, segregation, and all our past and present mistreatments of people of color never existed. There are already racist systems and policies in place, and if we continue to act as if race isn’t a real problem or claim “colorblindness,” changing them will never be a possibility. Who benefits from the suppression of stories of people of color? Certainly not the people of color, who are forced to suppress their identities and bury their experiences. America needs to become a place where these experiences can be heard, valued, and then seriously addressed. (Greenberg, 2016)
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Another downside to colorblindness is that it equates color with something negative. The phrase, “I don’t see color, I just see people,” implies that color is a problem and that it’s being ignored. Importantly, this is something that is never said to white people. No one ever says, in reference to a white person, “I don’t see your color, I just see you.” For people of color, whose race is a pivotal part of their personal identities, the comment can make them feel overlooked. The necessity for colorblindness suggests that there’s something wrong with the fact that God made people of color, and that their cultual backgrounds shouldn’t be discussed. The color of a person’s skin has nothing to do with who they are, it’s simply a genetically passed down trait influenced by the geographical location of their ancestors. A person’s skin color doesn’t equate to their character.
Racial labels and terms are complex and often problematic. However, the problems associated with colorblindness are possibly far worse. Without being color-conscious, we would never be able to acknowledge the racial disparities in our society. Some examples of these are inequalities in income, health, and education.
Let’s begin with income inequalities. The typical black household now has just 6% of the wealth of the typical white household; the typical Latino household has just 8%. According to the U.S Census Bureau Survey of Income and Program Participation, the median white household had $111,146 in wealth holdings in 2011 compared to a significantly lower $8,348 for the median Latino household, and $7,113 for the median black household.
African Americans are at a higher risk of having health problems, but they also have less access to healthcare than white Americans. Black Americans die at higher rates from all major causes of mortality in the United States than all white Americans. The most significant differences can be found in deaths by heart attack between black and white Americans. The rate of essential hypertension, a precursor to heart attacks, among black Americans (approximately 37%) is about twice that among white Americans (approximately 18%) (Dressler, 1993, pp. 325-345).
Colorblindness completely invalidates people’s identities. Racial oppression is only one facet of “race”. Race is also now very closely tied with people’s identities and signifies cultures, traditions, languages, and heritage; it can be a genuine source of pride. Race has become a basic ingredient that makes up a person’s being, even if you don’t consciously notice its role in your life. Imagine being forced to suppress something that you openly acknowledge and value about yourself. Denying people of their identities isn’t racial progress, instead, it repushes us back into our racist history.
True progress will come when White Americans no longer feel threatened by the racial identities of groups of color. When people say that they don’t see color, they’re ignoring all of the experiences that people of color have endured. It dismisses and invalidates their experiences with prejudice and stereotypes. Papering over the daily challenges faced by people of color doesn’t make them go away; it just sends a message that those experiences don’t matter enough to be acknowledged, that they don’t need to be talked about (Castro, 2017).
Many sociologists today are extremely critical of the phrase “colorblindness” when discussing race. They argue that as the mechanisms that produce racial inequality have become more covert compared to those prevalent during the era of open and legal segregation, the way we speak about racism has also become more obscure. Not only that, but they also fear that the refusal to acknowledge race allows people to overlook the constant appearances of discrimination in our everyday lives. For the first half of the 20th century, it was entirely legal to deny blacks and other racial minorities basic rights that white Americans had access to, such as housing, voting rights, and jobs. Civil rights reforms helped to make these practices illegal in present-day society, but discrimination still persists through a combination of economic, social, and institutional practices and ideologies.
The colorblind approach to race isn’t an accidental thing. Many of us are taught at a young age that talking about, or even just acknowledging race, is something we don’t do. However, this way of thinking only hurts people of color. We must embrace the differences; we have to talk about it. Pretending that race and racism don’t exist won’t make them go away. It won’t save us from the horrors of our ancestors’ past actions. Colorblindness is just as big a threat to racial justice as White Supremacists. Claiming colorblindness isn’t a way to solve racism; it’s an attempt to shelter ourselves from the horrible reality that is racism in modern America. Promoting colorblindness is easy. Colorblindness eliminates the need to recognize and discuss extremely uncomfortable realities while perpetuating a culture of racism, injustice, and oppression. Acknowledging differences is not racist, but refusing to accept racism for what it is today is.
Citations:
- Dolezal, M. J. (2018, February 23). How the Philosophy of “Colorblindness” Can Perpetuate Institutional Racism. Retrieved September 28, 2018, from https://medium.com/@matthewjohn_36675/the-philosophy-of-colorblindness-perpetuates-institutional-racism-9717e90608db
- Greenberg, J. (2016, July 21). 7 Reasons Why ‘Colorblindness’ Contributes to Racism Instead of Solves It. Retrieved September 28, 2018, from https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/02/colorblindness-adds-to-racism/
- Sullivan, L., Meschede, T., Dietrich, L., & Shapiro, T. (n.d.). Racial Wealth Gap. Retrieved from https://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/RacialWealthGap_1.pdf
- Dressler, W. (1993). Health in the African American Community: Accounting for Health Inequalities. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 7(4), new series, 325-345. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/649213
- Castro, V. (2017, April 25). Do You See in Color? Retrieved from https://www.diversitycouncil.org/single-post/2017/04/25/Do-You-See-in-Color
