What tools should I use to help me master time management skills?

What is time management and how can it help you get more done in less time? This question has many different answers to many different people because time management is not a type of cookie-cutter course that everyone can use for their lives. With each individual comes different needs. And although you can learn time management skills and techniques, you must approach it with your own style, your own goals, your own visions, and your own unique motivations.

In today’s article we will discuss motivation and how it can help you manage your time better so that you can get more work done, spend more time with your family and friends, and have a better sense of accomplishment in your life.

The term motivation itself contains “motive”. And without a clear understanding of your motive (why exactly you are doing what you are doing) then you will be forever lost in the cycle of doing more and gaining less. You must be absolutely clear about the reasons “why” you are undertaking all of the tasks in your life. This is not limited to your work and career choices, but your personal and family choices as well. You can never effectively manage your time if you are not motivated enough to do more and at faster speeds. And this motivation comes from understanding the underlying reasons why you are doing whatever it is you are doing in the first place.

Take out a pen and a piece of paper and start this little time management mental exercise. Simply ask yourself the following questions and write your answers down:

Why do you work as much as you do? Why are you involved in the tasks that you are involved in today? Why do you work so hard? What is it that you are trying to achieve? And what is the fastest and most simple route to get you from where you are now to where you want to go?

Now that you have started to put your thoughts on paper, your next step is to start gaining the additional knowledge and skills that you will need to perform your best and with the greatest productivity. Your goal is become an expert in time management. And in order to become an expert in any subject, all you need to do is read and study the principles outlined within that material each and every day.

Read books on time management for thirty minutes each morning and again at night. Listen to time management audio tapes and CDs in your car while driving and at home in your spare time. And back up all that you see and hear with action. Back up your studies of time management with practice and I promise you that you will start to see and feel changes not only in managing our time, but in all areas of your life as well.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Is Your Time Properly Organized For Maximum Performance?

Interruptions are a roadblock to work, but they come all day long in the form of babies, friends, and personal and household emergencies. Life involves learning to accomplish things in spite of interruptions. Don’t wait to organize yourself until all the interruptions are gone.

You have three strategies: (1) work around them, (2) eliminate some, and (3) manage others. When you are stopped for one reason or another, train yourself to go right back to the job you were doing. When the task is well denned, it is easy. For example, if your first housekeeping goal for the day is to clean a bathroom, when an interruption comes, it’s easy to go back to the original chore. Otherwise, you may waste time or risk being sidetracked.

You can learn to work with direction and purpose. Think of how a receptionist at the front desk of an office operates. She takes care of each request as it comes, but goes back to typing a letter whenever she gets a chance. Do not let an imperfect situation be an excuse to do nothing.

Eliminate some of the hassle by taking a good look at your life. If you are really serious about this, keep a log for two days. Make a brief entry of what is happening every fifteen minutes. Efficiency experts do this analysis in businesses to pinpoint time leaks and problem times. Who is the offender? When? Is one time worse than others? What was needed when they interrupted you? With this insight, you can start improvement.

Some interruptions are caused by lack of order: runs to the dryer for socks, trips to the store for forgotten ingredients, or shoe hunts. Devise a way for kids to get their own drinks of water. Install a pet door so your animals can get in and out without your help. As one father has said, “Instead of putting out fires all day, catch the guy with the matches.” A little organization can save a lot of hassle.

Sometimes we interrupt ourselves. Perhaps you are not very dedicated to the task and can be easily distracted. You might think of a phone call that needs to be made, remember to take something out of the freezer, or get an urge for a snack. There is a difference between a break and an interruption. To stop in the middle of a job with an unnecessary interruption is a defeating work habit.

It takes time after each interruption to start up and build momentum again. Next time you are tempted to jump from what you are doing, ask yourself if you could wait a little longer until you finish this project or until you get to a better stopping point. Plan periodic breaks to refresh yourself and take care of such needs. A paid secretary gets “coffee” breaks. You can, too. This is self-control.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Time Management: Avoiding unnecessary meetings at work

Creating good time management habits at the office can be a tough, especially when you must work around other people’s projects and meeting plans. But just because somebody wants to schedule a face-to-face meeting doesn’t mean that the meeting must be held. Once you talk with that person on the phone, you may discover that you can gather all of the necessary information without ever having to take time from your day for a meeting with him.

Another example of unnecessary time-wasting at the office is attending meetings where it wasn’t necessary for you to be there. You would be surprised as to how many meetings are held with people who did not need to be there. How much time is wasted for those people? How much of their time management planning goes down the drain due to these meetings?

But how do you communicate your desire to bypass a meeting or to have a meeting canceled altogether, without offending the person who is trying to schedule it? Simply try to ask the person on the phone questions about as much information that the meeting is to be about. Then politely say “Well it looks like I have everything that I need, how about I get to work on this project right away and we can meet about the results tomorrow”? However you approach the situation, be conscious of who you are dealing with and what position at the office they hold.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Organize Your House For Order & Neatness

A great way cut down cleaning time by changing organizational patterns is to plan not to let things get dirty. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cleaning up. Thus, you can put rugs both inside and outside the entrance doors so that dirt and trash will get caught there before being dragged into the house. You can put foil on the bottom of the oven so that if anything spills, all you need to do is change the foil rather than clean the oven. You can use cook-in bags for things that might splatter. If you don’t have a cook-in bag, at least use a pot with very high sides.

One of the hardest problems for me to deal with was soap scum in the bathroom from the hand soap. It melts into the soap dish and foams over the side, hardening into semi-cement. I hate it. Luckily, just at the time I was ready to do something about it, soft soap became popular. That was my solution. The only problem is that it is quickly used up by my teenagers. So when it is time for a refill I fill the container with dishwashing liquid. Sometimes I put slivers of bar soap in it together with a few drops of perfume. It works fine, making a perfumed creamy soap. This way, too, I can get rid of those pieces of soap that are too little to use but which I am too frugal to throw away.

Another method to speed up cleaning is to spot chronic problem areas and look for a solution. I had a trash can for throwing away food in my kitchen. It had no top because I thought it would be too much of a problem to remove the top each time, and it would be too difficult to do with scraps in my hand. The can was not very satisfactory because it was unsightly and the food kept splattering onto the white wall behind it, requiring frequent wiping with bleach and soap.

When I finally awoke to the fact that this was a chronic problem which needed a solution, I was tuned in to solving it though I didn’t have any idea how I would do it. Soon afterward I was wandering through a discount store and saw a garbage can with a lid and a foot pedal that opened the lid. This kept the food scraps covered and when the top lifted back it protected the white wall from streaks and spots of garbage entering the can. I had seen these cans frequently but, until I had identified my specific cleaning problem, I had not really noticed them. If you identify a problem with a view to solving it, often the solution soon comes knocking at your door.

Another way to organize for order is to put things away. This is a very hard habit to get into, but it is a top priority. I learned a little about this on the day after Thanksgiving. The shopping center was really crowded. The shoe store salesmen were bustling around. Shoe boxes and shoes were everywhere, some piled by the customer and some where the customer had been before. When I asked him how he kept all these boxes and shoes straight, he gave me these tips which can also give you ideas for your home:

1. Don’t let too much time go by between straightening up. Keep things up.
2. Each salesman has his own area of the store for his responsibility so the manager has an idea who is falling down on the cleaning job when he sees what area is messy.
3. Every time a salesman goes in the back to get another shoe, he takes something with him whether it is his or not.
4. The fourth thing he did not tell me - I saw it. It was that he had his standard and he personally saw that the system worked.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Time Management Skills: Making a clear vision of your most productive self

Do you want to know how to make the most out of your time? Are you searching for a way to get where you want to be in life faster than the speed you are currently going? The key to succeeding in these areas involves understanding and implementing time management strategies that high achievers use every day of their lives to make more money, increase time spent with family, and achieve all around happiness in life.

Regardless of your daily schedule, whether you work for someone else or yourself, your goal is to compete against yourself to see how much you can get done that contains the most value every day. Think of it as a personal game that you are playing. Each day when you set your personal deadlines and making the most of your schedule, work to race against those set time goals. Work faster, beat the clock, and accomplish your tasks earlier than expected.

Keep the mental vision of yourself as a super product individual in your mind at all times. To help keep this mental picture alive in your head you can use a technique that works for thousands of successful men and women all over the globe. And that technique is to remember a time when you were the most productive in your life. Remember how effective you were at handling those tasks at that time. Consider how efficient you were. You were doing all of the right things and at the right time and at record speed. In addition to accomplishing more, remember how good you felt about yourself and the confidence that properly managing your time did for you.

Now take a look a few years from now and imagine yourself as being the most productive and successful people in your career field. What would your day be like? What would you look like? How much work would you accomplish each day? What hours would you be working? These questions are to be written on paper to help you create a vision for yourself. Doing so and taking a look at your vision every day on paper will do more for your time management needs than anything else.

Once you have created a clear mental picture of the our future self, continue to visualize your ideal self as if you already had the time management traits that you desire to have today. Strive to act as if you had the urgency of the “you-of-tomorrow” in everything that you are working for today. Remember that the person that you see in your vision can and will be the person that exists today, so long as you keep that vision regardless of the circumstances. “So starting today, set the same goals, work with the same vigor, and feel as though you were making the most of your time as you are with your future-self and as you did in the past.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Give Your Dreams & Goals Priority Time

Clearing out your time schedule is a vital priority for living your dream. “Do you know how busy I am? I couldn’t possibly take on one more activity!” This is an exclamation we often hear from active, involved individuals. Even when we’re not spending our time exactly as we would prefer, we commonly feel that the demands pressed upon us preclude our having much of any choice in the matter. But if our dream is a last priority in our daily plan, it will also be the least likely outcome of our day, and our life.

If you go to a doctor or diet clinic for help in losing weight, you may be asked to keep a diary of your food intake. Only when you know what you are actually eating can you know what changes need to be made. The same is true of managing your time. It’s important to begin keeping a record of how your time is spent. Once you have conducted a realistic assessment of the time available to you and the requirements made for your time, your options will be more apparent.

Begin by keeping a list of your activities during each of the seven days of one week. Write each activity in a column down the left side of a page, and write the days of the week across the top. Tally up the amount of time spent in each activity per day. Leave space for totals for the week on the right side. Your page might look something like the “Time Spent on Activities for a Week” chart.

When you have filled out this chart for one week, study it carefully. Are you surprised at what it reveals? What do you observe about the way you spend your time? What changes can you make to manage your time optimally? Make a list.

In observing small children at play, I have noticed almost without exception their innate tendency to dump out the whole toy box before beginning to interact with the toys. They knock all the blocks down before beginning to build something new. Every piece of the Tinker Toy set must be pulled apart before a new construction is begun. Children inherently know the importance of starting anew, from the empty box or the blank table, when they want to create something new, all their own.

Your time is your creative medium of expression, just like the child’s box of toys. When you want to create a new set of priorities that highlights your dream, start like the small child with the blank table before you. Take a clean sheet of paper and write your Dream Statement across the top in large letters. Draw a chart where you can show activity time segments for an ideal day. Decide which activities you want to accomplish each day. Begin by allocating set periods of time to work on your dream - periods that are unlikely to be interrupted by other demands. Many people find that rising earlier in the morning serves this purpose. Once you have set aside times for pursuing your dream, list your other activities in time segments, to represent the way you intend to spend your day. Combine optimal productivity with spaces for relaxation and rejuvenation.

Popularity: 22% [?]

How To Become Successful By Working Less

You have been told the hard and simple truth: if you aren’t getting much out of life emotionally and financially, then you must look at what you bring into life. Clearly, to get more out of this world, you must make some changes in your life.

Now for the pleasant truth; success has little to do with hard work. The natural order of the world doesn’t dictate that you have to work hard to earn a good living and get more out of life. On the contrary, working fewer hours than most people, and at a more leisurely pace, may in fact help you to get a lot more out of life - financially and emotionally.

Most people over-dramatize the value of hard work for acquiring wealth and happiness. The late Joe Karbo, author of The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches, coined the saying, “Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money.” What Karbo meant was that most people are too preoccupied with their demanding and unfulfilling jobs, as well as with frivolous after-hour activities, to devote some creative effort toward generating alternative, less demanding means of income.

In truth, the most difficult way to make a good living is to work hard for it. Hard work is no match for relaxed, creative action. Unlike people who preach the virtues of hard work, the relaxed achiever knows that important, imaginative projects lead to a lot more impressive financial results and personal satisfaction than does working long and hard. By choosing this route, you become a peak performer. You don’t have to work hard to make a decent living; you have to work smart, however.

Poet W H. Auden wisely expressed his views on work: “In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it.” The second of Auden’s three ingredients is the one that most people in the modern world overlook and violate. Most people in Western societies today put way too much time into their work lives and not enough into their personal lives.

With all the modern technology at our disposal, none of us need slave away to the extent that people did twenty or fifty years ago. Greater opportunity to seek a balanced and wholesome lifestyle exists now more than ever in the history of humankind; unfortunately, most people are too uncreative or too afraid of freedom to benefit, however. Today’s prosperous times should be able to support millions of people seeking their true selves through creative pursuits and self-expression while working only a few hours a day.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Time Management Skills: Making a clear vision of your most productive self

Do you want to know how to make the most out of your time? Are you searching for a way to get where you want to be in life faster than the speed you are currently going? The key to succeeding in these areas involves understanding and implementing time management strategies that high achievers use every day of their lives to make more money, increase time spent with family, and achieve all around happiness in life.

Regardless of your daily schedule, whether you work for someone else or yourself, your goal is to compete against yourself to see how much you can get done that contains the most value every day. Think of it as a personal game that you are playing. Each day when you set your personal deadlines and making the most of your schedule, work to race against those set time goals. Work faster, beat the clock, and accomplish your tasks earlier than expected.

Keep the mental vision of yourself as a super product individual in your mind at all times. To help keep this mental picture alive in your head you can use a technique that works for thousands of successful men and women all over the globe. And that technique is to remember a time when you were the most productive in your life. Remember how effective you were at handling those tasks at that time. Consider how efficient you were. You were doing all of the right things and at the right time and at record speed. In addition to accomplishing more, remember how good you felt about yourself and the confidence that properly managing your time did for you.

Now take a look a few years from now and imagine yourself as being the most productive and successful people in your career field. What would your day be like? What would you look like? How much work would you accomplish each day? What hours would you be working? These questions are to be written on paper to help you create a vision for yourself. Doing so and taking a look at your vision every day on paper will do more for your time management needs than anything else.

Once you have created a clear mental picture of the our future self, continue to visualize your ideal self as if you already had the time management traits that you desire to have today. Strive to act as if you had the urgency of the “you-of-tomorrow” in everything that you are working for today. Remember that the person that you see in your vision can and will be the person that exists today, so long as you keep that vision regardless of the circumstances. “So starting today, set the same goals, work with the same vigor, and feel as though you were making the most of your time as you are with your future-self and as you did in the past.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Two Keys To A More Successful Career

Are you worried that you might not have what it takes to make it on the job in the future? You’re not alone. In a survey of 100 personnel managers by the Cambridge Human Resource Group, a consulting firm, more than 40% said that their firms’ employees worry about what talents and abilities will be expected of them in the future.

Below are two broad themes to remember for improving your odds of on-the-job success:

1. Further your education. Consider these telling statistics: For every dollar earned by a college graduate, the average high school grad makes about 57%. Holders of doctorate and professional degrees take home roughly twice as much as those who have B.A.’s. A fast-tracker’s learning curve shouldn’t end with any particular degree. By building up new skills at work, you stand to enhance both your career and salary.

What abilities are most sought after in corporate America today? Computer know-how, for starters. Workers who use PCs to ply their trade earn roughly 10% to 15% more than those who don’t. Other top talents include technical writing ability and managerial wizardry. Regardless of your line of work, in our global economy foreign languages can give you added leverage. As a banker, think of the edge you’ll have with a fluency in Spanish; if you’re a corporate lawyer, think of the punch you’ll pack with crack Japanese. Luckily there are plenty of places that can help keep your skills competitive. Hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide offer executive education seminars and short courses. For a quick tune-up in a specific area, say, negotiating prowess, don’t forget community colleges and professional associations; many offer a wide range of career classes.

2. Don’t thumb your nose at lateral moves. “Up” would seem the only logical career climber’s destination. As corporations continue to strip away management layers, however, you can count on more job openings to be sideways moves. In fact, over the next decade roughly half of all job moves are expected to be lateral ones, not vertical. Such career zigzags can carry you farther than you might think.

By testing out new opportunities in other departments and divisions at your current employer, you may gain valuable experience, not to mention great networking contacts and a better view of how the overall firm functions. Although your pay and prestige probably won’t spike right away, such experiences can help stem job boredom, broaden your career prospects, and eventually help you to move vertically. So if you’re in a rut and don’t see much chance for a step up at work, ask your boss for a lateral transfer.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Time Management: Turn off your television!

Did you know that the average person wastes up to 70% of their free time by watching television? Are you one of those people? Chances are that if your goal is to make better use of your time for more important items in your life, then you may need to kick the television habit to the curb!

Below are 6 ways in which you can make better time management by controlling your TV habits:

1. Ignore the TV and choose to work on hobbies such as gardening, puzzles, reading, stamp collecting, etc.
2. Only permit yourself to watch two hours of programming on Saturday and Sunday for an entire month. You will be amazed at how much more focused you will be.
3. Instead of watching sports games on TV, why not attend them instead? Not only does this get you away from the television but it also can create more quality time between you and your friends and family.
4. Understand that you do not need to watch TV for your news and information. You have been programmed to do so since birth and with today’s online news reports you do not need to get drawn back into watching television just to see what is happening out there.
5. Make it a point to go an entire week at a time without ever turning on your television. So this at least once per month, or more if possible.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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