Effective Time Management? No!
Many people want to be coached to manage their time better. I say NO! to that. You cannot manage time anyway; it just keeps ticking away no matter what you do.
What you can do is manage yourself based on the two concepts I keep mentioning: self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Following are four principles to maximize the time that you have. They take time to incorporate into your life at the habit level. Don’t give up. Keep practicing.
How to manage time best? – a crucial question for most people. Effective time management is a major factor of success in business & political life. S/he who gets promoted is 10:1 in control of their time.
Good Enough
Accept that no human being is meant to do everything. We all have our uniqueness; things we do better than others and vice versa. Perfection is not a human condition. Cut yourself some slack and adopt the concept of “good enough”. You can rework your resume 50 times. Is it really so much better than a much earlier draft? You can shop for the perfect dress endlessly? Wasn’t the first one you tried and liked as good as the 15th? How much time did you spend past “good enough”? Demand higher standards of excellence where it really counts.
Learn to like tracking time. It’s a useful habit which will naturally lead you to more intelligent personal time management.
Specialness
Concentrate on excelling in what you do well, what you would enjoy doing better, and new areas you would like to learn. Delegate, hire, share, partner with people who complement you or can fill the needs you have in areas you don’t enjoy or do not know that well. Don’t ever berate yourself for not being able to do it all. Appreciate your talents and excellence and flaunt them. They are you, yours and very special. Let others have their specialness too. The results will not only save time but enrich and free you.
Energy and Time
Know and honor your energy levels. Are you a morning person, do you have an afternoon slump? Your time will be best used if you pace the tasks you have to do based on this knowledge. Do the most challenging at your peak energy time. Build in your Joy Breaks both as rewards for finishing a formidable task and to refresh yourself at low energy periods.
Focus in the Moment
Develop habits that help you focus on what you are doing in the moment. Do not allow yourself to think of what you have to do next while you are doing what you are doing. Put a “do not disturb” sign on your door and do not take phone calls. By putting everything else out of your mind while focusing on the task at hand, you will be using your time efficiently. If you get stuck on something, take a break. Move to something else, get the information you need to continue, change scenery, stretch, whatever it takes, but don’t sit there stuck.
Article by Dorene Lehavi Ph.D
Articles
Effective Time Management in a World Short on Time
A curious advert caught my eye recently: “Shorter deadlines, competing priorities, endless meetings, interruptions and even higher quality expectations are just some of today’s time challenges. And yet the number of hours in the day remains the same.” Question springing right from it: How one can manage time to cram more things into a unit of time, such as an hour? read on…
Time Mastery vs. Time Management – Understanding the Difference
Mastering Your Time? What does it mean? Certainly not managing time. Between managing and mastering the way you use your time is quite a difference. Why we manage our time? Right, to be more efficient, to wring our day ‘dry to the last drop’ so as to have as much productivity squeezed out of as possible. To be an efficient time manager can be extremely beneficial, especially at times such as ours where time is almost everything. read on…
Is Attaining the Goal the Goal?
The world being as it is, careening headlong into the future, we are forced to do multiple tasks at once. Isn’t it the only way to finish what we need to do in a day if it only has 24 hours? The keynote of our training is the statement that if we attain all our goals in a period of time, we are deemed successful. read on…
What is Time and How We Measure It
To many a man the question ‘What is Time?’ is obvious. They say: Time? It’s an hour which divides into minutes and seconds, or it is a day which divides into hours and minutes, etc. etc.. To so many of us, the nature of time as a physical and philosophical phenomenon is a black cat in a dark room. read on…
Balancing Your Work Time Management Wise
Personal balance is envisioned by many as all kinds of things on the two pans of a scale, in perfect balance. This is a ridiculously naive goal. Plenty of frustration awaits anyone, who expects to lead life with everything, work, family, social life, allocated a certain amount of time everyday, so that’s every piece and bit is “in balance.” Just think of it. A delayed bus can ruin your business meeting, or exacting boss can keep you up at work well into after business hours breaking to pieces your day long looking forward to a cosy family dinner. read on…
How to Use Your Time Wisely
More often than not young people don’t get it how important time really is. They either just laze about, watch the box, or they lie in their bed, and play video games. As they grow older, they start to think about things they have achieved in life. And, much to their astonishment, they haven’t done a lot neither in personal development, nor in pursuing a career. read on…
Time Management for Breaks
How to use power of time management in managing breaks and interruptions of one’s day? The way people interrupt you can be challenging and quite annoying. Sometimes one thinks how it is possible to concentrate when everybody seem to get in the way with their requests, orders, commands, etc. Your boss alone can be the cause of a great many interruptions in a day. Here’s where time management skills come in. read on…
How to Manage Your Time Best
What are two singularly important things in business? Right, money and time. However, it is money that most people care and tend to give more attention to, isn’t it? More often than not we think of time management in very simple terms, like: “What tasks am I to do today?”, or “What is my next task?” What’s worse, we pay time tracking far to little attention, despite its pivotal role in effective time management.read on…
Managing Your Time
Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is “time poverty.” Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal lives. Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they feel. read on…
Why Waste Time on Trivia if You can Spend it on the Real Thing
Urgent matters that life is rife with really make very little difference in the final analysis. Say, you’re five minutes late for a corporate meeting. You are scolded like hell for just a five minutes, while a corporate meeting can prove a real waste of corporate time (including the chairperson’s), such as taking-so-long minutes of announcements that would be better off emailed you in advance. read on…
Management Tips
Whats Keeping You At The Office (9 Tips To Get Home Quicker)
“Work smarter, not harder” is a cliche that has darted in and out of the workplace for years. But it’s still as true as ever. And it’s often overlooked advice that truly works. “Working smarter” means think strategically about how to improve your productivity. read on…
Time Management Tips
To achieve maximum success and productivity in the work place it is essential that we understand how we use our time at work. Like many things in life, we take time for granted and give little thought to it until we no longer have enough of it. read on…
Time Management Tips – To Do List
When preparing a “to do” list you should also consider the things you should not be doing during your day. It’s fine to have a well planned to do list each day, but if you are easily distracted then it will be the things that you are doing in-between completing your list that will be the big time wasters. read on…
Discover new features, promos & discounts.
