'm late! I'm late! .....for a very important date! And so is everyone else apparently! Everyone is busy, busy, busy and there continues to only be 24 hrs in a day. Knowing how to manage your time is not about what everyone else thinks you should be doing. It's about what you want to do with the time you have here on this planet. For everyone, our 24 hr day should divide into approximately 8 hours of sleep; 8 hours of work and then EVERYTHING ELSE has to fit into the last 8 hours. Shopping for food, processing it, eating and cleaning up from it. Taking care of our bodies and the appointments, exercise and hygiene. Taking care of our homes,cars and other 'things'. Parenting children, visiting with friends, family and making memories. Then, yes, self-care and down time. It's hard to figure out how to juggle it all! And what people often do is compare themselves to others or look to what society is doing to see what 'normal' is. However, in today's society, with social media sites as the reality check it can be overwhelming for the person who doesn't have their own internal standards for how they want to prioritize things. So to cope the first thing you need to do is know yourself and what matters most to YOU! And be realistic. If your neighbour decks out their house for Halloween because that feels creative to them and you don't then that's fine. Do what feeds your spirit and creates positive energy for you and not what you think you 'have' to do. And in terms of self-care, marketing will often tell you that what will make you feel happier is to take that week long holiday to wherever. However, often, if you include the attitude of being on holidays into a 'Holi-day' then you can take a day off and relieve your stress because you are including those exploring, adventuring times into your life. I like to do an exercise with people where they write down all of the things they like to do for self-care onto a piece of paper. It could be going to a concert, checking out an art gallery, fine dining, whatever. And then I challenge people to figure out how they can take the concept of that idea and break it down to a smaller and more manageable money/time frame. So a concert could be putting the artist you like on YouTube while you clean house. A break at work could include checking out art online. Fine dining could be stopping at the grocery store to buy lobsters on the way home. Remember, fun and positivity are things that you want to build into your daily life and it doesn't have to be a big thing to include it. So let me end with adding the wonderful carpool Karaoke that I saw James Cordon and Michael Buble do and I trust that you will get creative about the ways that you manage your time to fit your values.
https://youtu.be/Kg7UWnNF_rA
https://youtu.be/Kg7UWnNF_rA