What will you do to flip your time?

The Formula

Your time equals = Building relationships + Supporting good habits + Ongoing education + Vision + Fun

We all have only 168 hours every week. Excluding the time we allocate for sleeping, eating, and preparing for the day, we don’t have enough time to work on our goals. The majority of time is spent at work or school (depending on your age). Are we maximizing every day we get? How are we ensuring that is actually true? Below is an update to an article I previously wrote on time management for millennials.

You can read that article here

Building for your future self

At the start of our careers, we can often lose track on how we are positioning ourselves for success. Seeking accolades and approval from the people we work with tends to be the main focus for recent college graduates and young professionals and although those are necessary requirements for upward mobility, they aren’t the only aspects of our careers that matter. Another part of setting ourselves up for success revolves around continuous education, adopting healthy habits, and skills acquisition.

Setting up “learning goals” on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis is a great way for tracking your professional progress over time. To make your system of tracking success even more refined, create a log of the mistakes you make alongside your learning goals. Being able to objectively track your results over time (good and bad) will help you see what areas of your work need more attention. The best way to implement any changes you see fit is to consider how you would like to “build” upon your future-self. Are you asking yourself the right questions before seeking new knowledge? This a foundational question to ask yourself as you begin to create your own curriculum after college and beyond.

Auditing your habits: Calendars, Mentors, and Peers

Another way to track your progress is by using your calendar. It may seem like a simple tool when trying to improve upon who you are as a person but, I’ve found my calendar to be invaluable.

My calendar is where I can visually see the following:

• My current learning goals
• Mistakes I’ve logged
• Daily appointments and meetings segmented by color/priority

Having a visual representation of what you need to accomplish can help hold yourself accountable.

In addition to using your calendar, having a mentor can also help in being held accountable to what you add to your calendar—if the guilt of not following it isn’t enough to spur the enthusiasm needed for you to get stuff done. A mentor can help you design the fastest way to learn. When you have access to a mentor, you learn from mistakes that you don’t need to make yourself.

An alternative to finding a mentor who can help teach you and objectively track your progress can be having weekly calls with a peer. During these weekly calls both of you can discuss the following:

• Goals you have for the following week
• Things you’ve accomplished
• Mistakes you’ve made
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• What you’ve learned from them
• Ideas for improvement

When I have these calls with a friend of mine from college, they usually last 10-15 minutes. It helps as an investment in yourself and your network, depending on how many of these calls you would like to have. In the event you don’t feel like you have anything to talk about during the call or if you quickly go over your agenda, here’s another prompt for conversation: “What questions did you ask today?” Asking this will always lead fruitful introspective thought for both parties.

If you don’t have a mentor you can reach out to right now, you can always find them in books. One book that I recommend is, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change” by Jim Collins. He defines a simple system for considering which essential habits are needed for your success and improving your progress over time. All of the suggestions mentioned in this book are practical and can be immediately implemented (the main challenge will be staying consistent in following what he recommends).

Related: What Could You Do If You Had A Second Brain?

Every notification is a request for your time

Do you get a return on investment for every minute you spend looking at a screen? Are all notifications created equal? How is your phone aiding you? Are you using it to help control your agenda?

Another distraction that deters us from concentrating on our everyday tasks and learning goals is the need to view and respond to every push notification that comes our way. Learning how to say “no” to the online communities we are a part of is key to making sure we are focused and not looking at our screens. The notifications will stay in your app; you don’t need them intruding on what you need to get done in the moment. Managing your time means managing your content consumption. The content you want to see and people you want attention from aren’t going anywhere.

Try turning off the notifications for all of your social media applications and setting aside time in your schedule to check up on what’s going on. No one will notice that you aren’t responding or posting, especially if you aren’t building a brand online and you’re just using it to stay connected with family and friends.

The most important thing to remember is that none of these recommendations work unless you put them into action, and you must always be honest with yourself. Books may not help, a calendar may not be completely effective, nor will a mentor/partner that holds you accountable. But you need to try them to see what works in the context of your own reality. And also, know that if you’re able to manage your time for work, you’ll have time set aside for fun. “Flipping” your time means finding ways to use it more effectively. What will do to make sure that is happening every day?