10 time management ideas for spontaneous people

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Knowing your personality is the key to successful time management. Psychologist Elena Lustina wrote specifically for Lifehacker about which time management techniques are suitable for people who do not tolerate rigid frameworks.

How to determine your personality type

When it comes to time management, I often hear: “What is this time management! How many times have I tried to keep a diary and plan everything - it doesn't work for me. Everything happens the way it happens."

Familiar situation? And you:

• you are perplexed by how people can work eight hours in the same mode, doing the same thing;
• making up a clear schedule for the day, you never live by it, you change everything on the go;
• keep a few notebooks, notepads, lists - it helps you somehow, but not very much;
• cannot work in a bad mood and are rather spontaneous;
• do not like to do one thing for a long time, love changes;
• you work with difficulty because you have to, but in the “want” state you are ready to move mountains;
• you finally start to do something as the deadline approaches (it is quite in your spirit to sit down to an important project the night before its delivery);
• you achieve your goals usually later than conceived, and in the process you study or go through a lot of options;
• need a special mood, a cup of coffee or a call to a friend to get started (these are special rituals that set you up for work);
• find it boring to live according to plan.

Congratulations! All this suggests that you are a special person. Career coach Emily Vapnik calls people like you multipotentials in her TED talk. And Barbara Sher, author of a number of bestsellers, including "Refuse to Choose", says that you are a human scanner.

In psychology, different types of personality were first described by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Then his ideas were supplemented by the Americans Isabel Myers and Katharina Briggs - the creators of the famous MBTI system. Socionics emerged from Jung's ideas in the post-Soviet space. In these approaches, only 16 types of people are distinguished (and only half of them will be spontaneous, you can learn more about personality types from the magazine). Each person has his own individual personal style based on a certain ratio of eight characteristics:

• extraversion - introversion;
• sensations - intuition;
• logic - feelings;
• judgments - perceptions.

Together, these personality characteristics explain why we live and act in a certain way, how our uniqueness manifests itself and in which direction we are interested in unleashing our potential.

Personality type	ENFP (communicator, journalist)	ISTJ (organizer, guardian)
Specifications	E (Extraversion) - extrovert; N (iNtuition) - intuition; F (Feeling) - feeling; P (Perception) - perceiving	I (Introversion) - introvert; S (Sensing) - sensing; T (Thinking) - thinking; J (Judging) - ordering
Key qualities and features	Friendliness, good imagination, brightness, emotionality, energy, inspiration, expressiveness, generation of ideas, risk, impressionability, openness	Fairness, pragmatism, objectivity, consistency, consistency, diligence, accuracy, precision, detail

The person on the left is the scanner. Active, energetic, sociable, creative super multipotential. There are many people of this type among designers, journalists, presenters, as well as in psychology and HR. Their main focus is inspiration, communication, connections between people.

The person on the right is the complete opposite of multipotential. Meticulous, organized, methodical. A person of this type can be both a software engineer and a manager. Its main focus is to put things in order and structure the system.

As you can imagine, these are two completely different types of people. The people from the second column would never even think of remaking themselves and becoming like people of the first type. But the spontaneous people in the first column, following the stereotyped ideas that it is important to be organized and consistent, risk losing all the energy for realizing multipotential if they seek to remake themselves.

Instead, it is worth realizing your merits and learning how to manage your world and endless desires. Use appropriate time management techniques to curb the chaos around you.

How to organize your time if you are a spontaneous person

1. Explore your natural rhythms

Working eight hours in a row monotonously and efficiently is not about you. During the day, there are always peaks when your engine is running at full capacity, and there are dips when creative energy is at zero.

Observe yourself for at least a week and answer yourself for what time (morning, afternoon, evening) you have a rise in strength, which tasks cause a surge of energy, and which ones - a decline. Organize your life to accommodate natural rhythms. During productive periods, solve complex and important tasks that move you forward, and in obvious periods of recession, switch, rest and gain strength for a new round, or take up solving simpler routine tasks.

2. Scan the situation and the opportunities hidden in it

There are times when everything goes badly. And, on the contrary, there are good moments when the result exceeds any expectations. Your talent is to use the current situation, not a hard plan.

Trust yourself: if you feel that right now is the time for some business, call, meeting, acquaintance - follow the impulse, and do not wait for the planned hour.

3. Highlight the three most important things for the day

This will help you be effective on a daily basis and move towards the right goals in the long term. In the morning, write down on a piece of paper and place in front of you the three main things to do for the day. Do them in any order, but by the end of the day check yourself: all three tasks must be completed. So you will get used to awareness, you will not lose focus and divert attention from the main thing, and at the end of the month you will understand how great you have progressed.

4. Synchronize the programs you need on your phone and computer

They wrote down the case in the diary, but it is not at hand, and you cannot say if you are free to meet. We put a note in a laptop, went to the meeting with a diary, in which the time was not recorded, and as a result, again, you do not know your time options.

Use technology for good: record any appointments, events with a reference to time in the calendar, and not in notes or reminders.

You immediately see your employment within the week, month, year, it is easier for you to plan and negotiate with others.

Be sure to set up calendar access on your computer and on your phone. This keeps your schedule at your fingertips, and automatic notifications help you plan ahead and stay on track.

5. Remember: you are not planning for someone else, but for yourself

To-do lists can be kept on your phone, in a diary, on your computer, or even in your head. It all depends on your field of activity.

Love writing in a notebook - buy a small notebook and carry it with you. Interested in apps on your smartphone - use them to keep things organized. Do not consider it necessary to plan household chores - do it from time to time.

Define a set of convenient tools for your needs and do not use options that are not typical for you. Remember that there are no standards in planning, your system of organizing tasks should be convenient for you first of all.

6. Visualize

A pleasant creative method that makes it possible to see the whole picture of the project and structure your own thoughts, highlight the main and important.

Would you like to try drawing a mind map right now? Do the exercise.

Take a piece of paper. Write “I” in the center and circle it. Now write and circle all the areas of life and interests that are important to you, for example: work, health, family, sports, finance, personal business, education, and so on - what is most important for you. Now write down 2-3 intentions in each of the items.

Then establish relationships. For example, sports are related to health, finance is related to work and education.

Only 5-10 minutes, and before you a visual map of your interests and directions of movement. You can use mind mapping techniques to structure any process and task. You can draw by hand or create maps in dedicated applications such as Coogle, Xmind, or MindMeister.

7. Do a lot of things

There are so many interests, that you want to be in time! But how to do everything? Try Max Foster's Auto Focus System. It is great for spontaneous people, because it takes into account personal characteristics: dislike of tough plans; the ability to work effectively when you enjoy the business; the presence of a huge number of interests and various tasks.

How it works:

1. Take a ruled notebook or notebook. Pages with 25-30 lines are most convenient for work.
2. Write down absolutely everything that you would like to do. One line is one thing. Personal, work, small, big matters - it doesn't matter, you need to write down everything that is in your mind at the moment. Whenever new ideas and challenges arise, write them down on the last line.
3. Now that all the cases are in one notebook, start working on the tasks. Scan your to-do list line by line. The moment you feel an interest, a desire to complete a task, take on it. This is called "Autofocus" - focusing consciousness on what really matters at the moment.
4. If you started a task and completed it to the end, cross it off the list. If you started but did not complete it, cross it out in the same place and write it in the last blank line.
5. If you decide to refuse to perform any task, highlight it with a marker (then you can analyze what these tasks are).
6. When all the tasks on the page are completed, put a cross on top.

Try it, this is an awesome method.

8. Move towards big goals step by step

In order to achieve large and distant goals or when working on complex projects, it is important to understand in advance what, when and to what extent you have to do. Agree that without proper preparation, you won't be able to achieve something meaningful, such as buying an apartment, changing your profession, organizing a conference, or writing a book. But once you break down such big goals into tasks and subtasks, they seem quite feasible.

For those who like to draw, visualizing the target as a timeline works well. You put point A (this is your current position) and point B with the designation of the goal and deadline. On the line, you mark the project milestones and dates. This will motivate you to meet the deadline, the business will be guaranteed to move.

9. Go in for sports

Is it paradoxical? What does time management have to do with it, you might say. And you will be wrong. Many efficiency gurus say that it is playing sports that allow them to stay in shape, to receive vital energy to achieve goals.

Sport teaches us to overcome obstacles and grow above ourselves, physical activity increases endurance, due to regular exercise, willpower develops. As a result, the experience of sports success gives us strength and energy.

10. Have fun

This is the most important thing, because energy is our everything. You yourself know in what state and mood you work best. So if things don't go well, it's time to do something nice for yourself, recharge, create a new peak in productivity and complete the job in a better state.

I hope that personalized time management ideas will help you enjoy your work and life.