Get Your Head Above Water:
In the first step to rescue yourself, I recommend learning and mastering a few quick but powerful techniques to manage the onslaught of "stuff" coming at you. These time management exercises include email triage, calendar analysis and planning, to-do list management, dealing with interruptions, and learning to quickly boost your energy. Often, a few small but powerful techniques can give you room to breathe and help carve out time for more important things.
Assess:
With newly rescued time, I recommend assessing your situation to identify the patterns in your life that hurt you, as well as the patterns in your life (like your strengths) that help you. In addition, take some time to clearly identify and articulate your highest priorities. What are the things in your life you care about most?
Build New Habits:
With clear priorities you can begin to build new habits that help support your priorities. These new habits include annual planning, weekly planning, daily planning, exercise, and learning to quickly shift from a state of stress to well-being. Just like muscles, the more you use and practice these habits correctly, the stronger they become.
Put It On Autopilot:
Once you`ve developed good habits, you can take all of your time management strategies to the next level. To do this, you can creatively invent ways to put your time management activities on auto-pilot. Examples of these time management resources include automatic bill pay, automatic financial transactions, automatic to-do lists, etc. In addition, with a bit of creativity you can come up with many quick systems and process that can dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend doing laundry, groceries, chores, preparing meals, shopping for presents, and many other parts of your life!
Remember, the solution to your time management challenges is you! By channeling your motivation to learn the proper techniques and practice them consistently, you can dramatically change your life.