Purposeful Time Management

Balance Feels Best Does your weekly planner reflect balance? Do you see all of the colors on your time management chart? Why would balance be important in your life? Balance Feels Best-Does your time management chart reflect balance based on the categories you established last week.

Four Components That Lead to Balance Body- Exercise for a sense of well-being and health. Mind- Exercise to sharpen the intellectual abilities. Soul- Exercise with inner reflection, meditation, prayer, and time alone. (intrapersonal) Heart-Exercise care for important relationships. (interpersonal) Looking back at your weekly planner, do you see all four components strongly represented throughout the week? Review Habit #7 from Covey’s 7 Habits of Happy Kids-“Sharpen the Saw”. Remind students of the 4 areas from Covey’s book (body, heart, mind, and soul). Many of these students have been through the Covey curriculum, but for newer Target students, this slide will be an introduction to the four components that lead to a balanced life.

Urgent and Important: Prioritizing Everything you do falls into one of these four categories. Urgent- Requiring immediate action or attention Important- Having great significance or consequence Discuss the vocabulary and emphasize the contrast between “Urgent” and “Important”. Point out to students that this chart/system helps us to prioritize our activities and make healthy, reasonable choices when confronted with questions about how time should be spent.

Urgent and Important: Prioritizing Quadrant I: Urgent and Important Study for a test tomorrow Being at the hospital when your baby sister is born Arriving at baseball practice on time Quadrant 2: Not Urgent and Important Having dinner with my family Taking the time to set goals and dream Practicing free throws to improve my accuracy for upcoming games Quadrant 3: Urgent but not Important Having to go to the store after school Interruptions during homework time Quadrant 4: Not Urgent and not Important Watching TV Playing video games This slide provides students with examples of tasks and activities that could be placed in each category. If you have an annotation feature on your Active or Smart Board, you may wish to allow students to provide more examples for each category in order to ensure student understanding of this concept before beginning the following activity. Following the brainstorming session, give out the attached Covey’s Time Management Grid to students to complete with their activities on their time management chart from last week and allow students to do this activity independently. Observe students while going through this process to ensure their understanding of how to prioritize using this system. Once they have put all of their activities from the previous week into the chart, merge this concept with the concept of balance. Do this by encouraging them to add any activities that they left out that would help them lead a more balanced life. For example, students may have neglected soul time and may need to add something like journaling, assessing goals, or quiet reflection. Or students may have neglected heart time and could add time with friends or family. The category that tends to be neglected is Quadrant 2…Not Urgent But Important. Encourage students to think about this category in particular. Let’s brainstorm some examples of activities that would fall within each of the categories Now, where do your weekly activities fit in this chart?

Building Margin in Your Life Discuss the importance of not having something in EVERY block. Our world encourages us to live as if we have no limits, so we fill up every minute of our schedules. We do as much as we can, spend as much as we can, and acquire as much as we can. Life on the edge means with life with no margin. Life without margin is a recipe for personal disaster. Margin is the space between your current performance and your limits. When you reach the limit of your resources, strength, capacity, time, or self-control, you have no margin. Without margin you have no room for error. The consequence of margin-less living are most apparent in our relationships. Love, intimacy, and friendship happen in the unstructured, unhurried world of margin. Everyone needs time to just “BE”! Building Margin in Your Life