Normally, I feel I am an organized person who manages my time well. Lately, however, I’ve been slipping up and having a hard time fitting in everything that I want to get done in a day. For this reason, I decided to attend the workshop “There Are Only 24 Hours in a Day” led by Shaunna Payne Gold and Sally Sagen Lorentson to help get me back on track with my organization and time management.
During the workshop, we started off by doing an interactive activity that took up a large part of the time. We were asked to write a list of all of the things we needed to get done in the near future. From there we sorted the items into different categories, such as weekly projects, house items, work, school, and so on. After we had everything separated, we placed the items in a time management matrix planning form.
We separated the objects into urgent versus not urgent and important versus not-so-important. I had many things that I had a hard time deciding whether they were urgent or not or if they were as important as I really thought they were. However, overall I feel the women learned a lot from this exercise; it stressed the importance of prioritizing tasks.
After we finished our task list, we switched gears into identifying and addressing stressors in our lives that make managing our time more difficult. Many of the participants identified common stressors for women our age — parents, school, and money were the top three. This came as no surprise to me because those are the top three stressors in my life. In addition, having friends or significant others rely on you too much caused stress for many women as well. Sally and Shaunna discussed how to address those stressors and the emphasized the importance of saying no.
Overall I feel this workshop was helpful. I know the women learned a lot because many of them had good things to say when I talked with them afterward. Time management is hard; many of us are trying to balance a variety of things all the time. We try to be perfect, which is simply an unrealistic expectation. This workshop helped the women prioritize the tasks in their life and limit the stressors that challenge them — something that ALL women need to know!
This guest post is by Elizabeth Andrews, NASPA intern.
