Time Management

One of the most effective skills you can have in life is powerful and effective time management. If you're not managing your time well, there's no way you're going to reach your goals at work and the life outside of it. 

Sure, the truth is that time is the greatest equalizer in life. No matter who you are, your age, income, gender, race or religion, you have the same amount of time as the next person. Whether you're filthy rich or dirt poor, your time is the same. It's not about how much time you have. It's about how effectively you manage your time.

So, if you're serious about achieving your goals, not only do you need to set those goals the right way, but you also have to get serious about avoiding distractions and becoming too immersed in the bad habits that you know you need to quit. Time-wasters need to fall by the wayside, and serious grit-and-bear-it hard work needs to take its place.

Time management statistics show that 15 minutes of planning saves an hour in execution and improves the quality of your work. Many people say that a plan is no use, as their work day is too fluid for planning. A plan gives you direction, a backbone of what you want to complete, and having a plan does not mean you can’t change it.

Another way to use your time more effectively is to accept the events in your life that you cannot control. Focus your energies on the events at work that you can control.

Manage time wisely and effectively includes:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ~Annie Dillard

Time. It is arguably our most valuable commodity

1. Determine how you spent your time.

There are a variety of ways to do this. Try keeping a log or journal for several days. Or make a chart or graph illustrating how your time is spent. Be sure to keep track of everything that's taking up your time: sleep, work, eating, relationship, school, hobby etc. Be honest with yourself here. This will show you how best to manage your time, especially if you find yourself upset at spending so much time in one area of your life.

       2. Set Goals.  

Goal setting is crucial to any good time management strategy. To make sure you’re engaging in activities that support your goals, both short- and long-term, you need to define those goals in terms that are clear and attainable.

To counteract this paralysis, the SMART goals methodology helps keep on task and on track. Standing for “Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Achievable, Relevant/Realistic, and Time-bound,” SMART goals provide clear, step-by-step tasks to help you get where you need to go.

     3. Prioritize goals.

This doesn't have to be incredibly detailed. Just rank goals in the order in which you'd like to complete them. Re-evaluate goals periodically. Once you’ve set your goals and determined the individual tasks you need to complete to achieve them, it’s time to prioritize. Evaluate what’s on your plate and placing each task into one of the following buckets (four quadrant):

• Important and urgent
• Important but not urgent
• Urgent but non important
• Not urgent and not important

    4. Just say NO.

Don't allow your schedule to fill up with things that don't get you closer to your goals or that don't make you happy. If something seems like a waste of your time, try to cut it short or get out of it. Be prepared to move on to more productive tasks and realize that your time is valuable. 

    5.  Plan ahead.  

If you plan your time wisely, you can focus on one task at a time, rather than wasting time jumping from one thing to the next (and rarely completing anything). This allows you to work smarter, not harder. Depending on your personality, make one of the options below part of your daily routine:

·         Plan the night before

·         Plan first thing in the morning

    6. Set a time limit to each task or leave a buffer-time.

Setting a time limit or buffer-time to each task prevents from getting distracted or procrastinating. Jumping immediately from one task or meeting to the next may seem like a good use of your time, but it actually has the opposite effect. After all, the human brain can only focus for about 90-minutes at a time. Without that break it’s more difficult to stay focused and motivated.

Applying “sharpen the saw” philosophy and keep mental, social/emotional, spiritual and physical states at peak levels by breaking frequently.

    7. Eliminate distractions.

Start paying attention to the number of times someone interrupts you when you’re in the midst of an important task. Track self-induced interruptions, too, particularly those of the social media variety. Your smartphone is extremely useful, but it’s also highly addictive and among the most insidious time-wasters known to man.

    8. Spend your mornings on MITs.

Mark Twain once said, "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first." His point? Tackle your biggest tasks in the morning. These are your most important tasks (MITs) of the day. Accomplishing those will give you the biggest momentum to help you sail through the rest of the day. Interesting work, meetings and social events can take place in off-peak time.

      9. Delegate more often.

If you’ve hired talented, dedicated employees, one of the most impactful management tools available to you is the power to delegate. Look for opportunities to pass responsibility for specific tasks to others on your team. That’s what you hired them for, isn’t it?

     10. Follow the 80-20 rule.

Pareto’s principle 80% of work gives 20% result and 20% of work gives 80% of results. Identify the 20 percent of the efforts that are producing 80 percent of the results and scale that out. You can do this with meticulous tracking and analysis.

    11. Eliminate bad habits.

One of the biggest time-wasters we have are our bad habits. Whether it's email checking, watching videos, excessively surfing social media, playing games, going out frequently to drink with friends, or so on, those bad habits take away the precious little time that we do have. Use your time wisely by eliminating your bad habits if you're serious about achieving big goals in life.

    12. Meditate or exercise every morning.

You might not think that this will help to better manage your time, but meditating and exercising every single morning gives you balance. Cut the toxins out of your life and get serious by doing this and watch as your energy, stamina and mental focus takes a drastic shift. (This is one part of “sharpen the saw” philosophy).

   13. Find inspiration when you're feeling lackluster.

When I’m dragging, I find inspirational sources and turn to YouTube, TED Talks, biography and any other inspirational source you can turn to when you're lacking inspiration. It's hard to stay on track with your time when you lose that drive inside of you. It’s a simple way to reignite that fire to get motivated and back-on-track.

   14. Concentrate on where you are.

Patiently wait to get to the office to start your work. Don’t start your business day at the breakfast table. It’s not good for the family, and it’s not very productive.

So here’s what you’ve got to do. On the way to work, concentrate on your driving/transport. In the shower, concentrate on the shower. At the breakfast table, concentrate on the family/meal. Wherever you are, be there. Don’t be somewhere else. Give whatever you’re doing the gift of attention. Give people the gift of attention. Concentrate on where you are.

   15. Don’t mistake movement for achievement.

You probably know some people around you who are just plain busy being busy. You’ve got to be busy being productive. Consider this: A man comes home at night and flops down on the couch. He says, “I’ve been going, going, going.” But the real question is, “Doing what?” Some people are going, going, going, but they’re doing figure eights. They’re not making much progress.

Don’t mistake movement for achievement. Evaluate the hours in your days, and see if there’s a lot of wasted time that you could manage better.

   16. Appreciate the little details.   

Your success should be a pleasure. Appreciating what you’ve acquired and what you’ve done and who you’ve become is important. It’s an important component in fueling your future achievements. Just knowing that you finished all you started out to do that day… that’s encouraging! It’s these little daily gains that continue to fuel your achievement.

Are some days a constant race against the clock? If so, you're probably overstretched and wondering how you'll be able to accomplish everything. Or maybe you're stuck in a rut and tired of how you're spending your time. Whatever the reason, learn to become more efficient with your time, manage your work or school load, and enjoy the time you already have.

   17. Be prepared. 

Don't let meetings, appointments, or deadlines surprise you. If you're prepared and have planned them into your day, they'll be more beneficial than if you were unprepared.

When planning for a specific event, try to estimate how long it should take. If you find yourself going over time, try to wrap up the event or ask for another appointment.

   18. Stop being perfect.

When you’re a perfectionist, nothing will ever be good enough. That means you’ll keep going back to same task over and over again. How productive do you think your day will be as a result? So, stop being perfect. It doesn’t exist. Do the best you can and move on.

   19. Batch similar task together.

When you have related work, batch them together. For example, don’t answer your emails and phone calls throughout the day. Schedule a specific time to handle these tasks. The reason? Different tasks demand different types of thinking. By batching related tasks together, your brain isn’t switching gears - which means you cut out that time reorienting.

   20. Take time for yourself.

This tip is often forgotten in the hustle and bustle of running a successful business. However, taking care of yourself i.e. getting plenty of sleep and exercise is critical to maintaining any upward growth trajectory.

In fact, one Harvard study found that insomnia can cause the average worker to lose up to 11.3 days of productivity each year, while another study found that regular exercise helps improve concentration, sharpen memory, speed up your ability to learn, and even lower your stress levels.

Making sure you have some free time each day to spend on the people and things you love outside of your business is important for your mental health, and can help keep you energized and passionate about your work. After all, it’s important to keep things in perspective.