Understand why it is important to have good time management skills.
Make time
your friend
Time can
help you become more productive and relaxed. And when time is used in a
balanced way, you will be rewarded with more than enough of it to go around. You
have to work at building a good relationship with time. Whether you want to
improve your business performance, bring balance into your life, improve social
relationships, reduce your daily stress or just take some time out for yourself
(that is, your goals), start with three things – commitment, application and
technique:
- Determine your goals and commit to them.
- Apply yourself wholeheartedly to achieve them.
- Use the right techniques to support your goals. Focus your efforts on first two stages, and stage three becomes easy. Investing a little of your time upfront enables you to have more time, so you can re-invest it in a number of productive ways.
Just get on with it
Time management will bring improved performance.
Time is money. You can get it, spend it, save it, invest it
and even waste it. Unlike money, however, you can never change the amount you receive.
You get the same 24 hours as everyone else, each and every day.
Being productive means investing your finite time resources
in areas that will bring you the best returns.
Formulating your time management strategy becomes a simple
task. Identify where you spend it ways to.
What you use your time on, you can then make choices as to
how to spend it more wisely.
In your strategy for time mastery, there are the 4 Ps to keep
in mind:
1. Procrastinating
When you regularly put things off to another day, you are procrastinating.
Procrastinating is probably your number one time
waster. Don’t moan and gripe about it, just getting on with it.
This inevitably leads to missed deadlines, rushed work
and a consequent loss of quality, all with high potential for impact on other
deadlines. It is better to just start, and soon, your task will be completed.
2. Prioritizing
Productive people make choices as to where they spend their time, to maximize their returns.
Doing the most important tasks first gives you the
biggest payback in time investment.
3. Processing
A considerable amount of the work people do today is service-oriented, often involving a series of connected processes. Some steps during the course of processing may be leaching your time away, like air leaking out of a punctured tire, while others can yield some big-time gains.
Processing is where you can begin to recognize both
time pains and time gains. So when you are doing something that is an
established routine, be mindful that there may be ways to improve it. Spotting
these can often save you considerable time and save your intern organization
sizeable costs.
4. Practicing
Improve your business productivity and personal effectiveness, reduce stress surrounding you and bring a little balance into your life, befriend good time management practices and see positive changes.
