Time management is one of the least-mastered and most-desired skills in out fast-paced modern world. Time management truly is critical to becoming successful, doing everything you want to, and achieving ultimate success.
Here are 3 quick and easy steps to help you manage your time better:
1) Eliminate time wasters in your life. Time wasters are things that interrupt you and you spend time doing, but you wouldn’t have chosen to do them given the choice. Eliminating these time wasters is critical for time management:
• Email—If you are spending more than 30 minutes per day on email (unless that is your business) you are spending too much!
• Telephone—If you answer the phone live more than 5 times per day during your productive time (work, work at home, etc.) you are sacrificing time management and efficiency. When you answer the phone, you interrupt your current productive flow and this kills your productivity.
• Television—This must be limited for you to achieve ultimate control over your time. My recommendation is 30 minutes per day, especially if you are not getting all the things done you need or want to.
2) Make a list of what is genuinely important in your life and just start doing the things on your list. One of the keys to time management is prioritization—you absolutely must know what you want to accomplish and then go do it. Today’s world has too many distractions and when you allow those distractions to become priority, you sacrifice time management. Follow these steps:
• Make of list of what you want to accomplish
• Set time frames for accomplishing each item
• Organize each item in order of importance
• Create a game plan for achieving each of your goals in its respective time frame
3) Begin to focus on time management throughout the course of the day. Your consistent focus must be on managing your time. Once you have determined your goals and your priorities, start focusing on simply getting those things done. If something isn’t on your goals list for this week—don’t do it until all your goals are done. When you prioritize every interruption that occurs and put your goals last, you will not accomplish your goals. Instead, you will be a slave (as you probably are now) to interruptions and probably feel like you never accomplish enough.
I think it is also really important to plan activities during the day based on the time of the day where you are the most alert.
Most of us won’t be able to solve complex issues right when getting out of bed, our body need time to regroup and get the machine started. The same can be said after lunch for example.
Planning complex activities requiring a lot of thinking when you are the most alert can be a real time saver, as you’ll probably spend a lot less time on it as you would otherwise do.
GM Giraud
My site on time management
Great point. Understanding our own personal prime time for doing certain types of activities increases our productivity and personal satisfaction.Thanks for your insight.