Skittles Time Management

In today’s world, there are those who command the details of their lives. As an Olympian Life Coach, you will encounter individuals who deeply desire to make the transition from one of the ordinary people in the world into the world of the extraordinary.

One of the most powerful levers that you can throw that powers your ability to create huge momentum toward the life that you desire, the life that is yours for the having is to gain power over the one thing which once it is gone can never be recovered: Time.

If you can learn to manage your time, you can easily become the maximizer of your efforts and desires. You can harness this power over time and pass it onto your clients who up until now may have been victims of time instead of its master.

As you begin to wield the power of time, your mind, your body, and your higher self become more exponentially powerful. It permeates all areas of one’s life, increasing potential, possibilities, healthfulness, happiness, and love, and things, the desires of your heart, start coming to you more easily.

There are many time management techniques, some will work better for some people than others. You need to find the system that works best for you, who you are, but you will have to try them, to see which one(s) are the best fit, and your clients would be advised to try them on for size as well.

While we understand that you cannot actually change time to fit your needs, you can change the way you interact with and use the time that is available to you.

Before you start to experiment with different methods of managing your time, you need to first evaluate how time is managing you.

The Skittles Time Evaluation is my favorite method to use for myself or my clients in a colorful (and flavorful) way to take a snapshot of what one week of time will look like at any given time. Plus, it’s fun. It’s a light-hearted approach to a heavy subject in life.

Get a weekly time management sheet by the hour, like this one:There are five colors of Skittles available to designate the five most important areas of life which are restricted by the power of time. Use one Skittle to represent one-half hour of your time in life.

Once you have your Skittles chart of how time is passing day-in and day-out, you can find ways to maximize your efficacy inside the time which you are already using, as well as the undesignated time left available.

While over the course of your life and your work with others, you will learn many techniques to home your time management skills, here are the top 5 ways to manage your time from in the beginning.

5 Ways to Manage Your Time

1 – Set Goals with Intention and Purpose

Most people are not productive when it comes to setting goals. You will be miles ahead if you are mindful of the goals that you set. Prior to setting your sights on a goal to achieve do a heart-check and ask yourself,

“Is this in line with my highest and best?”

This will help you sort through those things that are in your best interests, and those that are not. If you are uniquely aligned with a particular goal, your success is more likely assured, otherwise it would be more of a distraction or side-gig.

2 – Prioritize

As you sift and sort through the tasks that you perform each day, separate them at least into two categories: Important and Unimportant. Focus your attention on the important things first.

A more advanced method of prioritization includes separating goals into short-term and long-term goals, then applying Steven Covey’s 4 Quadrants

Quadrant I is for the tasks which are both immediate and important. Do these tasks.

Quadrant II is for strategizing and development of long-term goals. If they are in alignment with your highest and best, make plans for them.

Quadrant III is for distractions that have pressure attached to them. (Someone wants you to do it now, but it’s not really that important.) Delegate these things for others to do, if you can.

Quadrant IV is for all those activities which do not serve you, have no effect on your life or sense of contribution, and are basically a waste of your time. (Think mindless internet browsing or binge-watching series on Netflix.) Eliminate these things from your list, your schedule, your life.

3 – Map Out Your Day

Make sure you don’t get overwhelmed with putting all your focus and attention on work-related activities. Make time for family, time with your partner, and time for yourself. This promotes healthful balance in all areas of life. Make time for those things that are good and important areas of your life.

Be certain to include time for healthy eating and exercise.

4 – Use or Create a System

I started using the Franklin Covey time management system. FC now has an app for your phone, consider giving it a try. No one system is perfect. Once you find a system that works for you, do not let your commitment be set in stone. It is likely that any form of time management tool will help. Some will be more effective than others, and what works best for you will change over time, as you do.

5 – Evaluate and Refine

With all this attention to managing your use or time balanced with heart and intention, you can maximize your efforts by regularly evaluating where you are at any given time. Do the Skittles project every once in a while and review where you are. Then always be looking at ways you can refine and enhance how you use each hour that is available to you each day.

Put Off Procrastination

Why do today what you can put off tomorrow?

In my line of work, I am blessed to find myself among the movers and shakers of the world. These people are visionary masters who take action and see their dreams burst into vibrant life before their very eyes. To you and I, it looks like magic, but in real life, the only difference between these abundant leaders who manifest miracles and the rest of us, is their propensity to do today what they could have put off tomorrow. In other words, they have an impeccable ability to do.

It doesn’t mean their doingness comes easy. In fact, in many cases it comes at great sacrifice, but they do it nonetheless. They are the doers, and you see their fruits of labor as they continue to take action and help to make the world a better place. Even if their personality is more subdued, their answering to a higher calling precludes and trumps their inclination to hesitate or procrastinate.

What about you? Do you have a tendency to put off until tomorrow what you can do today?
Procrastination is rooted in complacency and lack of motivation. Some people might label such a person as lazy, or a couch potato, if they are more apt to be reluctant to take action. But isn’t that the common vibration all across America today? In general, people just are not as motivated to take massive action anymore. Hell, they’re not even prone to think for themselves anymore. It’s just easier to let someone else deal with it and enjoy what’s left over.

I mean, life in America has gotten a lot easier that it was only a hundred years ago. It’s hard to imagine a world without planes, trains and automobiles. It wasn’t that long ago to suggest living a life with media, computers, instant communications technology and online shopping would have been considered witchcraft or science fiction, and if you persisted, possibly an invitation to change your address to the loony bin.

So it’s easy to hang out with Jack and Diane and get high and watch the tube, two American lovers with nothing better to do, or surf the web, spend countless hours scrolling through social media, or whatever other pastimes might be distracting you from your opportunity to do something.

You have things you want to accomplish, but it seems like it gets harder and harder to get things done, because it seems like there’s just not enough hours in a day anymore. There’s just not enough time to get done, the things that you might like to accomplish. It seems like you’re always in a rush to get things done at the last minute. In fact, if it weren’t for the last minute, you might not do anything at all (and there’s nothing wrong with that).

You look around and think, “What’s the big deal?” as you notice that no one else you know is doing anything, either, so it just must be normal, and it’s good to be normal.
Lucky for us all, there is an amazing example of normal people accomplishing amazingly significant things every day, that they are not able to avoid doing. If you’re not one, find a woman who has given birth to a child, and you will be in the presence of such a person.

This is the ultimate act of creation, to see life magically burst before your eyes.
Was it fun? Hopefully parts of the process was enjoyable, but much of the process was challenging and in those final moments before birth, excruciatingly painful. But she pursued, pushed through, and so did the baby. And in that moment of success, when creator holds her creation in her arms and looks that baby in the eyes… There is no more meaningful moment in this life.

Moments, like this, are experienced by the doers who take action and do the work necessary to see their projects come to life, too.

So what’s keeping you from getting from here to there?

You might begin by looking around at ways in your life where you can tweak your life to create more opportunities to do something noteworthy of significant; maybe something you’ve felt compelled to do, but just thought putting it off would be easier.

If there’s something welling up inside you, and you’re thinking about taking action, maybe start with a simple to do list. This is an easy way to get your feet wet in the arena of productivity. Just by making a list of things you might like to accomplish today. You can ramp up your productivity by assigning a numeric value indicating how important an item is on your list by using a scale of 1 to 10, or 1 to 100, whichever feels better for you. And be diligent about getting the most important things done.

The next step to further improve your list’s efficiency is to take a moment to review what might be involved in accomplishing the things on it. How long will it take? Set aside the time necessary to accomplish specific tasks. The better you get at estimating and making time for things, the more time you will have for other things throughout the day.

As you begin to make changes in your life, you will notice things falling into an organizational arrangement, allowing you to adjust and make changes to maximize your time. The more tidy you are able to keep things around you, the more efficiency will be realized as you continue to streamline your daily activities. At this point, you may want to use some of your newly acquired free time to further streamline your environment. Then make time to reward yourself for doing so.

You are no longer a victim of the ticking clock as you begin to create time for activating your goals, dreams and desires. You’re making simple adjustments and creating more time for you to take the action necessary to prepare for the birth of your dream. If a particular task seems overwhelming, break it down into smaller steps which can be taken a bit at a time. Before you know it, you will have conquered the seemingly impossible as you move closer and closer to your goal and you find yourself on the other side of procrastination, leaving it far behind for those who are more “normal.”

You are accomplishing the most important things earlier in the day, so that you are being able to enjoy the easier tasks as the day goes along, so that you can enjoy more peaceful evenings, and find yourself sleeping better, knowing that you have made progress today.

You are dealing with the issues as they arise. You’re finding ways to take action over feelings of inadequacy, second-guessing, and varying states of emotional stress. Every day, you are better than the day before, and you are emerging as the confident, take charge person you need to be, to make your best contribution to a world waiting to hear your voice.