Time management strategies: sensing for occupational balance

Time, Rhythms, and Embodied Decision-Making

A flexible yet structured routine supports wellbeing when it aligns with our personal preferences, capacities, and life demands, as well as our cyclic nature and nervous system patterns. Effective time management is more than organization, it’s an embodied process.

We often think of decision-making as purely rational, but neuroscience shows that the body guides our choices. According to Antonio Damasio, our brains store emotional memories as somatic markers, body-based signals from past experiences. These markers act as an inner compass, helping us sense what feels right or wrong long before we consciously know why.

From an occupational therapy perspective, all that we do, our occupations across the lifespan (daily activities, play, leisure, and productivity) gives us meaning, and the felt sense of being in time, space, and context.

In Somatic Therapy, working on time management means exploring into the singularities of each person to bring clarity to their challenges, without dissociating them from the body's conditions and environment. It helps to conceptualize three interrelated components, inspired in the Model of Human Occupation:

• Capacity- is the nervous system state and bodily conditions. To be aware of rhythms of time, implies to be aware of my diffrent states (stressed, relaxed, tasking mode) and how they connect with my demands.

• Volition- is the patterns of thought and feeling that emerge from subjective experience, (interpretation, meaning, anticipation, and prediction). Volition will help to put in order priorities: to be aware of the own sense of efficacy, to have clarity about what interest me more, what I value most is at the core of motivation.

• Habituation- is the internalized readiness to act through consistent patterns of behavior. Habits and social roles shape our routine, and they emerge attuned to the temporal, physical, and social environments (Kielhofner, 2008).

  
  

In somatic therapy, we are all practitioners of doing, becoming, and belonging. I accompany my clients in orienting toward flexible, context-sensitive strategies, building personal plans for time-awareness that are embodied and responsive. A sensory profile can further deepen awareness of body-based preferences and their effects on daily living, play, and productivity.

Matching demands with capacity requires self-awareness, somatic check-ins, and flexibility, which may not always be available to those with fixed schedules or heavy responsibilities. Still, I encourage finding windows of time for intentional care, whether engaging in a chosen activity or taking restorative pauses for sensory regulation.

Ultradian rhythm breaks are short, intentional pauses that honor the body’s natural 90–120-minute cycles of energy and rest. Taking 5–20 minutes to pause, breathe, or shift focus supports nervous system regulation and genuine recovery, not just productivity.

Tools like the Pomodoro Technique (25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of rest) or the more flexible Flowtime method (working until focus naturally wanes) can help align your workflow with your body’s signals. Both invite an attuned relationship with your energy rather than forcing focus through willpower.

By learning to listen to the body’s rhythms, time management becomes time awareness for occupational balance. Broadly contextual and grounded in the material possibilities of control and coherence. Awareness of the enacting influence of the material and relational landscape must be at the base of codifying rhythms according to neurotype, nervous system state, volition and motivation.

I believe that a process of recovery, self-knowledge, and development can not be unaligned with an analysis of human occupational components, the commitment to practice, and the right support to build up caring containers for and from experience.