In the past four weeks I was testing all the tools mentioned in the previous posts. First week started off very positively: I found a lot of energy to stick to my four point agenda and I managed to get back the excitement connected with my work. Because of my schedule--working as a teacher--I usually start very early and finish pretty late. That's why it's imperative that I prepare all materials for my coming week in advance (preferably on Saturday or Sunday). So, the first week was very productive: by taking care of myself and not wasting time and energy on "being tired", I managed to get really good results.
The following two weeks, however, were much worse. My schedule included a lot of traveling as I had to deliver three, full day training sessions for corporate clients in a different city. This was truly exhausting...
That's why in the past three weeks I went back to my old ways of stress-inducing, frantic, last-minute preparation and the "putting-out-fires" system of time management.
It turns out that my productivity experiment has, so far, been a failure. I clocked in one productive week versus three unproductive ones.
One thing that I managed to succeed in, though, was not feeling bad about my lack of productivity and not initiating the vicious circle of self-hate. Instead, I decided to take the analytical approach. Why was I unsuccessful? What can I do to fix that?
The reason that I failed was simply too many tasks...
I came to realize that time management is first and foremost energy management. A good friend of mine once said: "You can't manage time; it's impossible. What you can manage is yourself in relationship with that time".
That's why your time management has to start with energy management. And if it's impossible, one thing you can do is not to kill yourself over it. In the meantime, try to devote the last drops of your energy to taking care of yourself and doing things that really make you feel good (productive things).
An obvious fix would be planning in advance and finding motivation to do it systematically.
The coming two months promise to be equally grueling. I'll be reporting on what tricks worked to get me through them.