Do you want to stop giving away your time to others through the work week and weekend?

Do you feel as if you don’t have enough time for yourself on any given day of the week?

Time management has many facets.

One of which is managing how you spend or allot your time with others.

It’s natural to want to help our colleagues, friends, and family.

But the problem lies when we spend too much of our personal time dealing with others.

What’s a person to do?

While you can’t add more hours to the day, you can certainly keep more of what you already have!

In this post, you’ll find a few suggestions on how to stop giving away your minutes and hours to others, and protect your valuable personal time.

Stop devaluing your personal time.

Your personal time is important.

It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from, your personal time really does matter.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re at home or are traveling.

It doesn’t even matter if you have something actively scheduled in your calendar or not.

Your personal time is your time!

If something is pushing against your time, say an impromptu meeting, phone call, or other request, push back.

Keep pushing back until your personal time is protected.

You (and your time) are worth it.

Stop automatically saying “yes.”

Do you always say “yes” to invitations, events, meetings, and other functions?

If so, you might be giving away your time without even realizing it.

Sure, you may not want to disappoint the other party.

But that’s the beauty of an invitation or meeting request; you have the option of declining.

Whenever any time commitment is being asked of you, whether it’s a last-minute invitation to a birthday party, or a non-urgent meeting with a coworker, take a few minutes to evaluate the situation before replying.

Do you truly have time in your calendar to spare?

Stop making allowances (or excuses) for other people.

One of the trickier issues in managing your time is making excuses for other people’s mismanagement of time.

What is this? Well, it can be something as simple as agreeing to extend the length of a meeting because someone else was late.

Here’s the rub: why should you have to change your schedule just because someone else made an error, even if it wasn’t intentional?

Your time is just as valuable as theirs.

While issues like these might be best solved on a case-by-case basis, always keep in mind that you can’t control other people’s time.

But you know who’s time you can control? You can always control yours.

How about you? Where are you going to take back some of your personal time in your schedule? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!