#GirlBoss Series: How to Manage Time {Like a Boss}

I had this weird notion in my head that it's impossible to manage my time until I had my very own assistants, just like Miranda Priestly, in The Devil Wears Prada.

Then again, in my humble state as a corporate junkie, I don't have three assistants puttering around to manage my schedule {maybe in a few years, HAHA}. So, what does a woman do but cope up and learn from the best.

{Yes, my dear Mac, this post is for you.} Many wise men say that our most important resource is our time and as for me, my goal for my time is to spend it on doing useful and revenue-earning things! And here are some techniques that helped me manage my schedule and precious {pretty expensive, in all honesty} time, as all our time are.

1. Plan at least one day ahead. As you grow older, more and more meetings will pile up and before you know it, you've overbooked yourself. What I do is, whenever I say yes to a meeting, an engagement, even a coffee or lunch out with a friend, I consult my BDJ planner and my iCal {I sync everything with matching alarms and all}. That way, I don't say yes to meetings where I am already booked.

2. Plan even the non-work stuff, especially your ME time. The trouble with us working women is that we sometimes forget to cut a slice of our day to spend on our individual desire. As I have learned, it's going to be tough destressing if we don't set aside time in advance.

3. Single-task. Once you've planned that 1 PM to 2 PM is the time for which you'll have to do all your email-related tasks {answering emails is a HUGE part of a corporate person's life}, do just that and don't look back. Getting distracted will cause you to linger in the task longer than planned and will create a domino effect on all your other tasks.

4. Determine how long it takes you to do a task. This is something that I learned from my IT colleagues: man hours. I've detested the thought of calculating how long it takes me to write a 1,000-word article but when I finally applied that to my tasks, I've been able to budget my working hours really well! If I know a task will take four hours, I will book my morning for that and not pile the work when it's virtually impossible to finish all of it in half a day. If a task is small, I put it together with all the small stuff and work on them simultaneously.

5. Sleep for at least 7 hours. Inadequate sleep is proven to decrease productivity. Listen to your body and sleep!

6. Plan your errands geographically. Look up the places you have to go to in a day via Google Maps if you have to. That way, you don't waste time on the road and getting all worked up over Manila traffic.

7. Know which ones are your daily priorities and strike off non priorities. As I've said, time and again, precious time is precious --- if you feel like you're wasting time on a task or it's not something you're crazy enough to do, give it up and do something more important.

8. List down even the single, minutest item that you have to do. Believe me, you're bound to forget. Forgetting means you'll have to go through the whole thing again and that means lost time.

9. Stay away from social media. Social media is such a huge time-waster, it's impossible to get anything done when you have the noise of Twitter in the background.

That's it for now but there may be a part two for this post. So tell me --- how do you manage your precious time?