Time Management
“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.”
— Harvey Mackay
Managing your time well is a very important skill to develop. Your ability to manage time effectively and efficiently contributes to your health, success, and happiness in life. In many cases, the level of stress in your life is directly related to your ability to manage time wisely.
Helpful ways to better manage time:
Organize: Clear your work space of the clutter and mess. Organize your important tasks or documents so that, when it’s time to work on them, they’re easy to locate.
Analyze: Determine which tasks are most important. Give your tasks rankings according to importance, with “1” representing the most urgent and important. Then prioritize and figure out what needs to get done by when. Then take action and get to working on your list without any distractions. Your productivity will increase dramatically just from practicing these simple strategies.
Note: It is crucial to differentiate between what is urgent and what’s important, and what is both urgent and important. Most things that we consider “urgent” are usually perceived as things we must deal with immediately. Sometimes, this perception leads us to do what’s “urgent” over what is important. Then, later, we find ourselves trying to handle everything that we’ve deemed “important” at the last minute, all at once. This can cause a lot of undue, self-generated stress. You will be amazed at the difference when you start differentiating between what’s urgent, what’s important, and what’s both urgent and important.
Example 1: You’re in a meeting, and your phone rings. The phone ringing is urgent, but the meeting is what’s important. Don’t answer the phone. Stay focused on the meeting. If your phone continues to ring, you can step out to answer it because it could potentially be both urgent and important, in which case you would need to handle that right away.
Example 2: It’s Monday, and your wedding anniversary is Friday. You know that it’s “important” not only to you but also to your spouse. Yet you wait until Thursday to buy gifts and make dinner reservations because you’re busy taking care of all the little “urgent” things that you are constantly bombarded with every day. Now your spouse’s favorite restaurant is packed and no longer taking reservations because you waited too long. So now your “important” thing just became both urgent and important because you have to find a reservation in less than 24 hours. It could have all been avoided, and you wouldn’t have to stress out if you had put off all the little “urgent” things that distracted you from doing what was “important” earlier in the week. It’s crucial that you differentiate between what is urgent, what is important, and what is both urgent and important.
If you spend five hours a week cleaning your house, would it be worth it for you to pay a small price to have a cleaning company give you back five extra hours a week? If you spend a couple hours a week maintaining your front and back yards, would it be worth it to hire a gardener? You can and should delegate your smaller tasks as much as possible in order to focus more on the larger, more-important tasks. You will have more time, less stress, and be able to do the things in life you really want to do, whether it’s spending more time with your loved ones, growing your business, better developing yourself, or increasing your income.
If you spend 20 hours a week doing busywork on small, urgent tasks, whether work related or personal, like running errands, etc. that take away from your time to handle what’s important and what’s urgent and important, would it be worth it to hire an assistant to handle smaller tasks so that you can focus on what’s important? In return, you’d have less stress, more time, and better results, which could increase your income, which would pay for the housecleaning and personal assistant. It’s all about creating a strategy that will allow you to most effectively and efficiently manage your time and manage your life. This will allow you to create more wealth and happiness than you’ve ever thought possible.
Some people believe paying someone else to do work they are capable of doing is wasteful, but that’s not the point. It’s about saving you time so you can do bigger and better things with your life. Even if it costs you more than it makes you, if it saves you time, it can be worth it. If you can pay someone to do your work and have an extra day free, every week, would that be worth it? For many people, I think it would be. Having free time — to do what you want — is important. You must have a well-balanced life. Life is not all about work. Working really hard to save for your retirement so you can enjoy an amazing life when you’re old is a rather dumb and old-fashioned concept.
So, let’s think this through: You’re going to work really hard while you’re young so you can have all this money to spend when you’re old, burnt-out, and exhausted from working? That’s an interesting strategy. Now I’m not saying saving money or having retirement savings is bad. All I’m pointing out is that most people don’t take the time to enjoy the present life they live now. They’re too focused on the future — a future that’s not even guaranteed.
So, live a little. Go on some vacations. Take some time off. Enjoy life and all it has to offer you. The better you get at managing your time, the more opportunities you will have to take time off from work and enjoy your life. If you have one of those amazing jobs that you don’t consider work, you probably wouldn’t want to take much time off. If that’s you, you’re rare — and what most would call “very lucky.” That doesn’t mean you don’t need some practice in your time-management skills, though. We all need practice in this area of our lives.
How can one person run a company — or multiple companies — and manage hundreds — even thousands or even millions — of people all by themselves? They can’t! That’s the funny thing. They delegate most of the tasks to other people and only worry about the larger, more important tasks. How can you do this? How can you become the boss in your own life?
Multitasking is bad. Don’t do it anymore! Give all your attention to one thing at a time. You’ll be much more productive. I will admit that it sounds weird, but by doing one thing at a time, rather than many things, you’re actually more productive. Studies have been done that have proven this strategy to be true. No more multitasking!
“Wherever you are, be there. When you work, work. When you play, play. Don’t mix the two.”
— Jim Rohn
Write down everything you have to do for the day. Then figure out what the result of doing each task is going to be and why you need that outcome. What’s your purpose? What specific actions do you need to take to get those tasks done? Put a star or something next to your must-do’s for the day so you know they have to get done. Schedule times at which you’re going to do each thing. If something is flexible, write “flexible” next to it so you know it does not have to be done today but can wait for when you have extra time. Measuring your results is important to making sure you’re getting everything done and improving your time-management skills. Make sure you’re accomplishing what you want to accomplish on your list — or your list means nothing. You will get better at accomplishing your plans as you continue to practice and apply this strategy.
If you’ve been working productively for a few hours, take a little break, walk around, stretch, have a snack. Then begin working productively again. So many people work eight hours a day or longer but aren’t actually being productive. If they were, they could most likely accomplish the eight hours of dilly-dally work in about one or two hours of focused, efficient productive work. Truly productive people will focus on nothing but their work/tasks/goals when they apply themselves to it. They can work a quarter as long but still accomplish more. They have time to reward themselves and take breaks to relax. Wanna-be productive people will allow themselves to get distracted and consume an entire day trying to accomplish tasks that are much more time consuming as they should be. They don’t have time to reward themselves with any breaks, giving them the illusion they are working eight-hour days and have such busy schedules.
Use your time wisely. We all have the same 24 hours a day. How you use it is up to you.
Random Fact
We lose half a liter of water a day through breathing.
