 If you're always wondering where your time is going and how you can get more, today's video is for you. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Time is our most valuable resource. Once it's gone, we can't get it back and we all want to make the most of our time. So today I'll give you five tips for time management and how you can get more of your day back. Stay tuned to the end and I'll give you a link where you can download our leadership development plan workbook and that'll help you set your long term, short term and midterm goals towards getting the career you want. When I talk to managers and executives, time management is one of the skills they feel their team members could use the most. So if you feel like you need a little help in this area, you're not alone. I think all of us wish we had a little bit better handle on where our time was going. When I was in the Air Force, I had one assignment where I was traveling three days out of the week at least and that was at least three weeks out of the month. So it required a lot of time management skills to get to where I needed to go. Meet with the people I needed to meet, take care of what I needed to take care of and then get back home and take care of all the things back at home station that still needed to get done while I was gone. I'm usually pretty good at knowing where I need to be and when I need to be there and kind of the organizational aspects of time, but I'm really bad at estimating how long a task will take. So that's an area where I could always use a little bit of improvement. Today, I'm going to give you these five tips that will help you do that and more to feel like you're getting some of your time back. Tip number one, get yourself a calendar. It can be paper or electronic. It doesn't really matter. I suggest using the one on your phone because we've always got our phones with us all the time now and it's easy to add, change, edit, delete stuff if we need to. And it solves the problem of having to erase and cross stuff out on a paper calendar, but if you're a couple of paper, that's your decision. Go ahead and do that. Put everything that's important for you to be in a certain place or a certain time other than where you normally are on that calendar. And I like to use the recurring features on this. So if it's something that happens every week or every day or at a regular interval, I use the recurring feature so I don't have to keep entering that over and over again. And I like to use the color coding feature to separate my personal stuff from my school stuff from my business stuff. Now, don't go crazy with this. Don't try to go put your whole year all at once. And I'll talk about this a little later. Just start with putting today in or this week or next week in and use this calendar to get an idea of where your time is going. Once you've got your appointments in your calendar, tip number two is to track how long they actually take and then to go adjust your future appointments accordingly. I know I almost always underestimate the time it takes for me to meet with someone or to do something, especially when I'm doing it for the first couple of times. So make sure you get this feedback loop back into your calendar. Once you see how long something takes, go back and adjust those appointments. And you won't have to do this forever because you'll start to develop a database in your head about how long certain things take. But when you're starting out, keep track of how long things take and adjust your appointments in the future accordingly. Tip number three is to not delete appointments off your calendar, especially appointments with yourself. One of the rules I have for my calendar is I'm not allowed to delete anything off of it. I'm allowed to move it around, find a different day, find a different time, but I don't let myself delete anything unless it's an absolute emergency. This way I'm able to take advantage of opportunities that come up but still maintain the commitments that I've made to myself. Now there will be times that emergencies come up and you do have to delete something. There's been more than once where it's gotten to be about nine or ten at night and I haven't gotten my workout yet that day. So I do, I delete that off the calendar and I adjust later in the week where I can put that workout. Tip number four is to leave some white space in your calendar. Remember how I said to schedule everything that's important to you on that calendar? Well, the emphasis is the word important. Meetings, phone calls, I even schedule my workouts and times I'm meeting with my friends for social things so I don't accidentally schedule something else in there. What I don't do is I don't start with, okay, eight o'clock, work. Eight to eight to 11, work. You gotta leave yourself some white space. You gotta leave yourself some room to move these important things around so that when opportunities arise, you can take advantage of them. Now if you've got a really critical task that you wanna get done, sometimes I do that. Sometimes I put video shooting on my calendar and that's there and that's blocked out for that time because it's important for me to do this. But you gotta leave yourself some white space. You gotta leave yourself some room to move those things so when those emergencies or unusual situations do arise or something comes up, you have a place to move those events too. So now I'm gonna come to what's really the most important of the five tips but I think you need to have a handle on the other four before you can really do this one. And tip number five is to set priorities and stick to them. Know what the most important things in your calendar are and know what the things that are a little less important than your calendar are. You're gonna wanna know this because when you have to start moving things around, you're gonna wanna know what is the most important thing that I've gotta get done because I can't move that and what are the things I can move around that? Now, you've gotta factor in some of the priorities of others when you're looking at moving things around in your calendar and setting your priorities because your family may have different priorities. Your boss may have different priorities. It's important to understand these and your boss may not agree with you on what your priorities are. So keep that in mind as you're starting to think about moving things around the calendar and setting priorities and sticking to them is that the views of others are gonna be important. So there you go. There are your five tips to manage your time a little better and feel like you're getting some of that time back. You won't actually be getting more time but it'll definitely feel like you are. And remember the calendar is just a tool in all of this. The real trick is to set those priorities and stick to them. I guarantee if you take on these five tips or even just at least a couple of them, even if it's just to start tracking where you're spending your day, you'll feel like you've got a lot more time and be able to find time to do those things that are really important to you. If you found this helpful, please like, comment and share this video with a friend or co-worker. If you've got more business or leadership questions, leave us a comment below and we'll try to answer it for you. Or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com. Evilgeniusleadership.com is also where you can find out about our coaching programs if you'd like to do some more one-on-one training and take on some of the specific areas that you'd like some help with. Thanks for watching today, really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there, lead the way.