Conversations on Time Management in English | 18 English Collocations & Idioms

Let me ask you, if you had an extra hour in your day, what would you do?

How would you spend that extra hour? Would you get a little bit more sleep,

catch up on your favorite sitcom? Spend some time on social media,

take a walk outside, or maybe even practice English?

All of us desperately want an extra hour to do something we love.

And for better or worse,

the only way to find that one extra hour is better time

management.

Whether it's sharing the latest tip from a podcast or an effective

strategy, based on personal experience,

the topic of time management is something my students love to discuss.

I'm Annemarie was Speak Confident English.

This is exactly where you want to be every week to get the confidence you want

for your life and work in English. Just like with my students,

I want to help you have confident conversations in English,

on the topics you care most about like time management.

So throughout this lesson today,

not only will you get a simple three step approach to finding that extra

hour a day,

but I'm also going to sprinkle a variety of common collocations, idioms,

and more so that you have the language you need to talk about time

management effectively in English.

[Inaudible].

All right. First things first for an effective time management strategy,

start with how you work. For example,

are you an early bird or a night owl?

When do you do your best work?

Most time management advice states that you should start your mornings with

MITs. In other words, focus on high value activities in the mornings.

High value activities are tasks that help you meet your big goals or

take steps toward progressing on a project.

These are not tasks like email or social media.

Instead they're activities that require brainwork or creative

energy work that requires mental effort or energy,

like problem solving, software testing,

reviewing a client's budget or planning a marketing strategy.

Getting those big things done,

those MITs when you're alert and focused guarantees that you

are making progress on your projects and goals. All of the other tasks,

the emails, social media, et cetera, can wait until later in the day.

Now, if you're a night owl and you find that you're particularly creative in the

evening,

it can also be a great idea to set aside a few hours at night to do some of that

brain work as well. So before we go on to the next step,

pause for a moment and think about what are some of the tasks that are

considered brain work for you?

What are some of the things you need to do to help you truly make progress on

your goals? If you want,

you can even write down a few examples of brainwork or your MITs and

share them in the comments below.

Doing that is the best way to start to get comfortable with some of the new

vocabulary collocations and more that you may be learning in this lesson.

Once you've identified how you work.

The second step in this process to better time management is to determine what

you can change about your current work schedule.

The best way to do that is to do an inventory of your time or

create a time audit. Do you ever get to the end of the day and think,

"I know I worked all day, but I don't really know what I did.

And I have no idea if I made any progress toward my goals." It's a

super frustrating feeling.

And one way to track real progress is to start to keep

an inventory of your time.

This is also the first step to helping you identify what you can

change. The key to making this work is to be honest.

If you spend 32 minutes on Instagram during the middle of the day,

put that on your time inventory.

Sometimes we're tempted to fib or lie, even to ourselves,

but this is for you to find that extra hour in the day.

So be honest with how you spend your time.

And here are four concrete steps you can take to begin

changing that schedule for better time management. Number one,

eliminate half-work.

Half work is when you are spending time focused on an important task that

you need to complete in order to reach the end of a project or a deadline.

But while you're managing your client's budget,

you randomly decide to pick up your phone and take a look.

You don't know why nothing happened. The phone didn't ring.

You didn't hear it buzz, but suddenly you just got curious.

Did someone send you a text? What's happening on Facebook?

Is there a new headline in the news?

The time we spend doing our important tasks,

but then getting distracted by something else is half work.

When we pick up the phone or randomly check in on the news,

we tell ourselves that it's just going to be really quick.

We're just going to look for a moment.

But according to a study from the University of California Irvine,

on average,

it takes more than 20 minutes to recover our mental focus and

effort. When we get distracted,

that's 20 minutes of lost time. And then in the end,

we have those feelings of not accomplishing everything we want.

We feel pressed for time and we get stressed.

So one opportunity you have when you review your time audit

is to eliminate half work. And here's how you can do that.

First batch,

your tasks task batching is when you review all of the,

that you do during the day,

and you begin to group tasks that are similar and do them at the same

time, as opposed to doing them sporadically or at random times during the day.

For example, if you have to return emails and phone calls to clients,

instead of doing one in the morning and one in the afternoon,

you would group all of that together and plan that in your schedule.

at one time during the day. This is batching or grouping your tasks.

Once you've identified a group of tasks that you can batch,

then you block time on your calendar for that particular activity.

Doing this helps to reduce the time need of gear

switching or getting lost in context switching,

and instead enter into a flow state.

Let's unpack some of that language,

switching gears or context switching refers to the mental

energy that's required, and the frustration we experience,

when our mind quickly shifts from focusing on one task to

something totally unrelated. And then back again. For example,

reviewing a client's budget, then checking in on social media,

then responding to a telephone call from home about grocery shopping after work,

and then trying to go back to reviewing your client's budget.

Your brain is shifting focus every time something new happens,

all of that means lost time.

And it takes additional effort to go back to the task that we needed to

complete the opposite of all of that is to be in a flow state.

This is when your mind is fully immersed and focused on the task that you're

doing.

And you may even lose track of time in a positive way.

The more that you can batch your tasks and schedule them

appropriately for blocks of time,

the more likely you're going to be in a flow state for all of those activities.

Now, in all of that, I mentioned the importance of not just batching your tasks,

but also blocking time on your calendar. When you do that,

a second step you can take is to set a time limit. For example,

give yourself 30 minutes a day to respond to emails during those blocks of

time, minimize distractions or interruptions,

leave your phone in another room, close the other computer tabs.

Do everything you can,

so that the number one thing you're supposed to be finished with in 30 minutes

gets done. You enter into that flow state,

you check all the boxes off your to-do list,

and then you go on to the next block of time.

You can even put a little bit of downtime in between those

blocks.

And that brings me to the last thing you can do when you're reviewing your time

audit: schedule buffer time.

A buffer is a protective barrier or a protective layer.

When we're talking about time management,

buffer time provides some protection before and after your

tasks, it gives you some space if you need it.

For example,

maybe you schedule time to respond to emails from 8:30 to 9:00 AM every

morning.

Instead of scheduling a meeting right at nine o'clock,

which means you have the potential of being late to the meeting or feeling

rushed,

scheduling some buffer time of 10 to 15 minutes gives you

time to protect your schedule.

If emailing takes you a little bit longer, it's no problem.

Your meeting doesn't start until 9:15.

Or if you want to take a mental break,

if you want to give yourself time to step away from the desk, again,

you have those 15 minutes of buffer time before your next appointment

or scheduled time block.

That right buffer time can also be helpful when you're switching gears,

when you need to mentally switch focus from one top

priority to another. Once you've done all of that,

the last thing you need to think about is how to make these time management

strategies sticky. When we start something new,

it's easy to take all that excitement and jump in a hundred percent.

And sometimes that leads to overwhelm.

We try to do too much too soon.

To make your new time management strategies stick,

the first thing that you should do is avoid

biting off more than you can chew.

This is a fantastic idiom and a really fun one to visualize.

I'm sure you can picture a child or someone eating something they love,

and they take a huge, enormous bite.

It's so big that they can't chew it. Figuratively speaking,

sometimes we do the same thing with a new project.

So a better approach is to pace yourself,

start with one change, do it consistently,

make it a habit. And then when it becomes a habit,

you can introduce another change.

The second thing you can do to help make your new habits stick is to

schedule time off from the daily grind.

In other words, give yourself a break from doing those routine,

monotonous, boring tasks that you have to complete every day.

We talked about scheduling buffer time,

and you can schedule time to recharge your batteries,15 minutes

to do a little bit of stretching, enjoying a cup of tea,

taking a walk or sneaking in a few pages of your favorite book.

Those activities give your mind a break from the daily tasks

that add up that are boring for us to do and help us prepare to be more

mentally focused, present, and creative for the MITs,

the most important tasks.

And now not only do you have a simple three step approach to better time

management in English, but you also have a variety of collocations,

idioms,

and more so that you can successfully talk about time management

and your favorite time management strategies with friends, family members,

neighbors, and coworkers. And you can do all of it confidently in English.

Now, before you finish today,

I want you to choose two or three of your favorite new expressions or

phrases from today's lesson and try using them in your own

sentences. Tell me about your favorite time management strategies.

Is there something you've tried that has been particularly successful for you?

If so, use some of the language from today's lesson to tell me about it,

the best place to share with me and everyone else in the Confident English

community is in the comments below. Lastly,

if you found this lesson useful to you, I would love to know,

and you can tell me in two simple ways, number one,

give this lesson a thumbs up on YouTube and subscribe to the Speak Confident

English channel. So you never miss one of my Confident English lessons.

Number two,

if you have a friend or coworker who is also working to be more confident

in English conversation, share this lesson with them,

you can do that by sharing it on Facebook.

You can send it by Instagram or email. Thank you so much for joining me.

And I look forward to seeing you next time for your Confident English lesson.