Time Management Reflection

Time management plays a huge role in my life currently.  Balancing so many things such as schoolwork, a job, an internship, leadership, and other extra-curricular activities has taught me the importance of managing my time effectively to ensure that everything is completed on time.  The main strategy that I use is alarms on my phone to set a time for things to be started by.  I pretty much plan my whole day out through alarms.  I'm also very organized in my head and am pretty good at guessing how much time an activity will take, which makes it easy to plan out my schedule.  One thing that I discovered through my time mangement activities is that on weekdays I don't really have a lot of time to just relax, my schedule is always so packed and stressful that i don't really have time off.  I like having a busy schedule so that way I'm not getting bored, but I desperately need to find a way to get some time to relax so I'm not as stressed out.  One thing that I would really like to improve in my time management is taking the time to write things out.  In the future I see my time management skills progressing toward using a planner to stay a little more organized.  Also maybe dividing my activities into the 4 categories that we did in class so in my head I can make a list of priorities and get those done first.  I think that if i can figure a way to factor these two things into my time management planning, then I will be more efficient and more successful, which is my ultimate goal.  I think that the 80-20 rule is very accurate.  I notice that a lot of the time, especially relating to leadership, things that don't constitute much of what we do end up having greater effects than we anticipated.  For example, Homecoming is our biggest event and altogether is probably 20% of the stuff that we plan in Leadership, however we receive close to 80% of our yearly profit from this one event.  It is definitely prevalent in other areas, but I definitely recognize it the most in Leadership.  I think that i will start to design my daily schedule to reflect more of the importance of things that are getting done so I am not leaving things that are important for last minute.  I definitely do little things to keep busy while pushing off things that take time and need to get done, and that is something that I really want to change so i am less stressed.  I think writing is everything, even though so much stuff is online nowadays, when I write things down they really stick with me, so i will try to employ a little more writing into my time management that way it will be stuck in my head.  I will deal with procrastination by being more organized, like I said before the more organized I am the more successful I am, so I think by improving this area of my life I will be improving many more.  The one thing that I spend way too much time on is Leadership.  As President I have a lot of responsibility, however some of the things that I do could easily be delegated to other people.  I just like taking on as much as I can so i feel like I am helping the school, which is the main reason why I take the Leadership class, but it makes everything less productive and especially makes it harder for me to finish other things.  I love Leadership and it has always been a huge part of my high school, but I think that I need to trust people a little more to get things done without me helping.  Time management is one thing that everyone can improve on, and I'm happy that this class is giving me the tools necessary to improve my time management.