GET MORE DONE IN LESS TIME:

 We’re athletes. We tend to have a million things going on in a million different places. If this story resonates with you, you MUST read this whole blog post:

It’s Wednesday night and you just got home from softball practice. You have so much homework to do but you haven’t had a moment to relax. After dinner, you get to your room and walk over old clothes and other things that have been strewn about on your floor. You plop on your bed, but you know you can’t stay on it long because you’ll fall asleep on it. Your Biology textbook is calling your name, but before you start the deep abyss of homework, you open up Snapchat. As soon as you open it you are overwhelmed by the amount of streaks you have to reply to and the messages you have. You start replying back and watching the stories that people posted. Before you know it a half hour has past. OOPS! Time to start homework. You slide down to the floor to grab your back pack and get our your biology homework. It takes about 5 minutes to look for your Bio textbook but you finally find it under your dirty softball uniform. As soon as you open it all you can do is stare at how messy your room looks. Surely you can’t start your homework with your room looking like this! You begin to clean it. Before you know it an hour has past, but maybe now you can focus on your homework. You open your binder once again just in time for you phone to start dinging with messages of your friend complaining about her boyfriend. You pick up your phone and go back and forth between homework and messaging for the rest of the night. You barely understand what you’re reading because you only focus on your homework about 2 minutes at a time in between texts. Before you know it, it’s time to go to bed and you haven’t made a dent in anything. The next morning you wake up throw your pajamas on the ground as you hustle out the door…

 
Being an athlete is a tough balancing act, but we make it even more difficult on ourselves by the environment we create. This balancing act continues as you get older regardless of whether you play sports or not. The habits you begin when you’re young follow you into adulthood! Take a good look around you and ask yourself honestly if you want to live with the tools you’re equipping yourself with now? Does that make you most productive? Does your environment make you motivated or stressed?

 
I’ve got some great insight that I have used personally in my own life. It has made all the difference in balancing life’s craziness and decreasing my stress levels. Use these three strategies in order to maximize your efficiency and productivity throughout the day. 

1. PURGE YOUR ROOM- CLEAN YOUR ENVIRONMENT

I used to save clothing I did not wear very often for a time I might need it. I might need that dress if I ever get invited to a 70’s party. I might need that color if I ever get shoes to match. I could go on and on with the “I mights.” There would be clothing I would not use for years. I saved make up like you wouldn’t believe. Headbands in all shapes and sizes had their own drawer. Jewelry was a huge tangled knot in a jewelry box. EVERYTHING was disorganized. The reason it was disorganized is because it was all too much. I had way too many things taking up space for fear that I might one day NEED it. Guess what? That day never came. There were things that were just sitting in drawers that made me 20 more minutes late for 20 years because I had to detangle the knot or I couldn’t find my favorite fill-in-the-blank anything without it tacking on about 20 minutes to my getting ready. Because there was too much, my closet was busting at the seams and my floor was a mess! 

 
Until I learned to PURGE my whole house of anything that I truly did not need, I would never have felt the freedom of things being simple. There is such freedom in a small amount of things. Everything has a place. There is extra room for more. Things don’t get tangled. Clothes get hung up nicely because there is actually space between hangers. 

 
If you’ve ever been in a very expensive store before, you notice there are very few hangers on a clothing rack. Why is this? The reason is because each piece of clothing is valuable. It looks visually appealing. You cherish it a bit more when it has its own space. Think of a luxurious home for sale in a magazine. People gush over these homes and visualize what it would be like to live like that, but reality is that YOU can live like that. Once lots of stuff goes into a luxurious home, it can quickly not look as appealing as it once did. What makes it look inviting and luxurious is that fact that it looks clean and spacious and there is room for creativity and focus. Purge your room. Make it a point to purge it every 6 months. Take out 5 garbage bags and make it a point to fill all of the garbage bags before the end of the day. Donate them to Goodwill. You will feel so good that you gave to someone less fortunate that you and you’ll finally be able to focus!

2.TURN OFF YOUR PHONE-FOCUS YOUR MIND

Hundreds of years ago people had less to worry about. Even 20 years ago there was much less fighting for our attention. Now we have parents yelling at us through our bedroom doors, our cell phone dinging from messages, emails, social media notifications and everything else. Can we please go back to the days where all we had to worry about was food, water, shelter and danger? The truth is that our brains are not made to handle everything that we have in front of us. Some people claim to be multi-tasking experts. If that’s you. Do me a favor. Write the numbers 1-25 as fast as you can and then the alphabet as fast as you can right after. Be sure to time yourself. Next, I’d like you to write 1-20 in between writing the alphabet. For example it would be 1, a, 2, b, 3, c, 4, d….etc. Time yourself for that as well. I guarantee that you will be much slower on the second one. Every time we hear the phone “ding” it puts a stress on our brain and forces our mind to make a decision….to answer or not to answer?!?! It takes us away from our current task and forces us to focus on something different. Your brain’s “danger” signal goes off when it hears the ding of your phone. Is this an emergency? What if my friend is in trouble? What could possibly be the notification? What if I missed that the sky is falling? Our brains truly do not multi task. Brains actually toggle back and forth between tasks.  Some people claim to be multitasking experts, but it actually just puts more stress on your brain and as demonstrated by the numbers and alphabet example, you are much slower. Do yourself a favor. Save your brain power for what is important. Put your phone in another room when you are focusing on something important. Really brave? Put it on airplane mode or turn it off when it’s in another room. The messages can wait. You’re serious about your goals and your grades. Your friends will learn to realize that they can’t get a hold of you during that time and they’ll respect it.

 3. BREAK THINGS DOWN INTO 10 MINUTE TASKS

Projects can seem daunting, overwhelming and ridiculous. Before you go to bed each night, think of all the things you need to do for the next day. Think of the most important 10 minute tasks that you have. Write them down. Underneath those tasks, write down anything else that would be cool to get done tomorrow. Try keeping these tasks to only 10 minutes. If there are tasks that take longer than 10 minutes, break them down into smaller steps. Of course some might be shorter or longer than 10 minutes, but try to use this as a rule of thumb. Your goal for tomorrow will be to get those 3 important 10 minute tasks done. Anything else you get done will just be icing on the cake. Do you have a project that is due in 2 weeks? Start writing down different 10 minute tasks that you can do each day to get closer to getting it done on time. You wouldn’t believe how much this can actually save you in the long run. Having a plan that you figure out the night before helps you to focus and get things done so much quicker the next day. If you had 30 minutes of free time during a class, 10 minutes given to you by a teacher at the end of class, or any spare time you can begin to be productive and get ahead! Having a plan makes all the difference.