Time Management | Work, Blog & Life in General – Finding the Balance

Hi everyone and welcome to our place!

I’ve been thinking on posting about this theme for a while now but I always ended up putting in the drawer and thinking “I’ll write about it next week”, well… Some months have passed not going to lie xD However, here it is! I’m going to talk about how I manage my time so I am able to work 8 hours a day, spending at least 1 hour in traffic everyday, blogging and continuing to do my life in general.

There are many posts and books and talks and videos and…. I don’t know, this subject have been mentioned and overmentioned. If you write Time Management in Google there are way too many articles that will pop-up talking about this. So, why am I writing about this when it’s all over the place? Well, first because that’s what I do in my blog! I think everything I’ve talked about as been talked before and I’m just here giving my 50 cents to the subject, but in this case there is something more!

From a person who have read many things about the subject and dropped many books with these complicated schedules for you to maximize your time to the second I found that most of this content does not work with me! I work in management which I’m used to… Well, manage xD and this makes me not to want to manage and schedule my personal life as I do at my work. Moreover, there are always things that are never mentioned in these kind of articles. Do they not clean their house? Do they not sleep, take showers, have lunch, stop for a bit so their brain can just breathe a little?

I don’t know how their lives are, but to be honest the sentence of “If you sleep 6 hours you will have 18 hours to be productive” does not work for me! I mean, I need to do my house chores right? And to be honest I love to sleep, so 6 hours will never suffice to begin with! I need AT LEAST 8 hours a day. Then you have the traffic which well, there goes at least a daily hour to the gutter because I can’t really do much in there, then I need to shower which there goes another 10 minutes and I don’t know about you, but I do enjoy having a meal with my boyfriend calmly while watching Anime/Series, so there’s go at least more 40 minutes… Oh and of course! I need to buy groceries and just spend a great amount of time waiting in lines or something like that. So, sincerely misters and misses that studied and are experts in the subjects, sorry to tell you but your ideas of time management do not work for me.

This way I decided that I would explain you how I manage doing 4 to 5 posts weekly in my blog, watch Anime and play video games, work full-time, do house chores, sleeping 8 hours a day and TAKING BATHS and yes I have a time for putting my brain into sleep (even though awake) daily. Now, this is not an easy thing to do, so don’t expect that I will give you something that doesn’t need any effort from your part. This is hard and you need to have the mentality of always hassling and never let your laziness take you down, which is pretty difficulty!!! (At least for me!)

Of course I’m not as good with this as Karandi, Irina or some other bloggers out there which seem to have clones working for them, but ok, let me start:

• I work in my blog everyday on my work breaks

Do you know those people who have one hour lunch and they use it every minute of it to stay out of the office? Well, I’m not one of those. I always bring my own lunch and I take at max 20 minutes to have lunch, drink coffee and smoke a cigarette. After that I come again to my workplace and there are 2 things I can do: Start working right away if I have something urgent to do and then later work on my blog or in another way if I don’t have pressure factor I work on my blog. Most of the people takes breaks during their 8 hours shift (depending when you work of course, the place I worked before I didn’t even have time to breathe – so no breaks) and they normally go to the social media, watch Youtube videos, read an article or two… Well, I normally write posts!

So yeah, even though every morning I just want to stay in bed after I get out my house I’m ready to work my ass off the maximum I can!

• Do Multi-tasking with tasks that you really can multitask

I’ve heard so many people shouting proudly that they are able to do multitask and what I see is various tasks started and none finished… Well, let’s say that is not really efficient is it? I only multi-task when one of the tasks do not really take much of my attention. For example, I’m the one who irons at my house so every week or so I will take some hours of my day to do this house chore and every time I watch Anime while doing it. This way I’m able to do my house duties while at the same time getting further with Animes so I can then review them on the blog 😛 Other example is that I always watch Anime/series with my boyfriend while we have dinner. Again, another way to get content for my blog while I have dinner AND I’m passing a good time with my boyfriend! Basically I’m doing 3 things at the same time and I am able to finish and deliver to all of them instead of just finishing with a half eaten plate, a half conversation and not remembering even half of the episode I’ve just watched.

• I decided to schedule my blog reading

If you have been here for a while and follow me on Twitter you know that I’ve been trying to read the most blog posts I could and failing miserably, it was getting to a point that I was not even enjoying, this way I decided to change the way I was approaching this matter. Everyday I take 30 minutes of my time, see what is in my reader and then read the ones that seem more interesting for me. It’s true that this way I read way less blog posts, but at least I am reading all of them fully and carefully which leads me to be able to comment a lot more and really appreciating all of your blogs and to be honest I’m enjoying a lot more of it! 😀

• I always do something when I do a trip that takes some hours

I visit my hometown every weekend in two weeks which makes to take a trip f more or less 3 hours to go there and more 3 to come back… OF COURSE I AM NOT GOING TO JUST SPOIL SO MANY HOURS! Instead of entertain me by playing video games I take this time to or just bingewatch an Anime series or to write drafts of my posts so then it’s just needed to copy to WordPress and join images.

• I use the traffic to catch up with Social Media

As a blogger you know that interaction in social media is really important! Although most of the times you are just shouting to an empty, dark place (specially if you are in the beginning) there are sometimes that someone may really listen, like and even click to go to your blog and read your post. If that person gets interested in that one he may just go read another ones or even start following you. But more than shouting your own work it is also important to talk with other bloggers, interact with their tweets and just see what’s happening. So, the traffic time is used for me to watch social media, normally Twitter. And that’s it! I don’t go to twitter again during the day unless I receive any kind of notifications. This one is important for me because I’m those kind of people who can just become hypnotized and spend all his day just scrolling social media.

• I don’t have a day off

For me everyday is a work day. My weekends off are always used to work on my blog. To come up with ideas, get some things done in my projects that will take more time and those kind of things. Of course I don’t spend all my weekend doing this, but I always takes some hours of the day to do this kind of things.

• I always watch Youtube Videos before sleeping

This one has 2 purposes, being able to fall asleep quickly as I explained in my anxiety posts but also to have some time of the day where I’m just watching something without thinking in anything. This is hugely important for me to be able to always give my 100% and don’t just procrastinate at any times whatsoever.

• Find the way you are more productive and use it and overuse it!

Everyone has their more productive way of working. For me it’s music, I always listen to music when I’m writing and I hear different type of musics depending on what emotion I want to transmit. For example while writing a story, if it’s a scene of action I put music that I associate with action scenes, horror I put suspense music and so on. When I’m reviewing games I listen to the OST so I can remember things easily. Well, I think you got the point! This one is super important for me because what without music would take ages to write I can actually write without stopping for a second.

Doing things like this I still do exercise everyday for an hour (not in the moment because of the arm injury) where I just play Just Dance and dance my body out and I play video games everyday which is the form of entertainment I prefer the best.

Last, but not the least, although I do have a routine I normally stick with I don’t schedule my day to the minute! I know that if I do it like this it doesn’t work! Sometimes I take more time reading posts, while in the others I’m just not with the mind to do it and prefer to just chill out and pass the day playing. The good thing is, since it’s not all planned I’m able to change it a little bit when I need/want 🙂 For example if I’m going to pass the weekend off somewhere or just chilling I will work harder during the week, if I see that my next week will be more difficult at work I’ll try to use the most time I can from the weekend to work on my blog and so on! 😀

Ant I think that’s it for the moment! I do hope that these kind of things help you to spend your time more efficiently and have more time for things you love and at the same time have time to sleep, eat and take a shower from now or then! 😛

See you Soon! 😀