Time Management Tips

I‘ve been finding it hard to find time to scrapbook lately. During the week, my nights seem to be taken up by everything other than scrapbooking, and then I’m left to do a flurry of layouts in just a few days.

Sometimes, I don’t even find time to scrapbook during a week.

It wasn’t working like this, and I needed to figure out how to change it quick. The answer came to me like magic, as I was listening to the This Is Your Life podcast by Michael Hyatt, and I knew it would work.

In his podcast, Michael talks about scheduling time in the Alone Zone. The idea of the Alone Zone is actually from a book called Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Basically, it means that when you are busy creating your schedule, you purposely schedule time in the Alone Zone, time for you and you only.

It’s easy to set aside time for yourself, but we often are so quick to let that time go when something else comes up. Actually scheduling time in the Alone Zone makes that time an appointment that you must keep.

No longer do you have to feel guilty about turning down other commitments because you legitimally have an appointment that you have to keep. Simple, sure, but just enough to trick your mind into thinking that this time is unavoidable.

So I thought, if I scheduled some time in the Alone Zone, what would I do? Immediately I knew that I would want to spend that time scrapbooking. Rather than scheduling time in the Alone Zone, I needed to schedule some time in the Scrapbook Zone.

If I made this time an appointment, and put it on my beloved Google Calendar, I would for sure keep it. I would commit myself to keeping this appointment, viewing it as important as a meeting for school or a doctor’s appointment.

So that’s what I did. On Sunday night, I sat down and worked out my calendar for the week. Once I had all my “must do” appointments on the calendar, I went ahead and scheduled some time in the Scrapbook Zone.

What’s great, is that I’m actually looking forward to these times, already starting to plan what I want to work on. Usually I just start working with the first thing that jumps up at me from my screen, so putting some thought into it is a nice change.

I’m excited for my little dates with Photoshop and happy they will keep scrapbooking a major part of my week.

What types of things do you do to make sure that you are scrapbooking?

Aaron Morris contributes to Simple Scrapper each month, sharing his expertise and life experiences on time management.

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