"We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever." - Bruce Lee
There are only so many hours in a day, there are only so many weeks and months in a year and there are only a limited number of years in our life. Time is the most persistent and relentless thing on earth. No matter what, it goes by. As such it is also the most valuable of all resources. You can never say: "I'll just go and get some more time." Once it's gone, it's gone. That means, life ultimately becomes solely a question of how we spend our time. It should become our highest priority to think about how we spend our time in the wisest way possible. We should make every second in our life count!
The term "Time Management" may be a bit misleading. Time itself cannot be managed or manipulated. We can only control how to make use of it. We cannot increase or decrease time, we can only decide how we spend it. Therefore, time management is less about managing time but rather about managing yourself in relation to time!
Bringing time management into your life will most certainly increase the quality of your life. You will be less stressed, you will feel more valuable and you will be able to make other people happy. You will be better able to balance your work life and your personal life. Does that sound too good to be true? It may do so in the beginning. Just wait until you start to realize the full potential of what time management can do for you and you will likely agree.
What is surprising is that very few people actually manage to make the best use of their time. Most just spend their days wandering around in a kind of haze, always doing the first thing that comes to their mind. And we know that our mind can be highly erratic. As a result, these people are just enslaved by time instead of controlling time themselves. If you are one of those persons, there is good news for you. Time management is something that you can learn by training.
You will see that the principles of time management are actually very simple. The hard part will be to have the self-discipline to follow through. That means, time management is always self-management. This is something YOU have to act upon it, no one else can take off that duty.
This is just one of the better excuses for procrastination. It's plain wrong that we work better under pressure, we just do our best under the given circumstances. Instead of working under pressure we should always aim for working under challenge.
Effective time management is all about keeping yourself organized. No one else can take over that task for you. Having a secretary schedule some appointments for you is fine as long as you revise and apply the principles of time management to the schedules.
After you learn how to work effectively you will be able to do more work in the morning hours than most of the rest of the people achieve over the whole day.
Time management does not equal to routine. It is all about gaining self-discipline. Without that you will strive for the mediocre. Strive for greatness instead!
Sticking to a schedule does not preclude spontaneity. You can always make spontaneous decisions when planning your free time in case that is important for you. Also, time management will allow you to add blocks of freedom and creativity to your schedule. However, if you feel like you would rather prefer working under stress, forgetting appointments, constantly making excuses and feeling inferior, then go ahead, it's your life!
Before we can start to learn the principles of time management we will have to analyze our own behavior. We need to find out what exactly we are doing with our own time. When do we work, when do we eat, when do we socialize, when do we surf on the Internet? For how long are we doing these things? When do we sleep and at which point of the day are we most productive? When are we wasting time? When are we productive?
For this we are going to use a very simple, but effective method. Take a sheet of paper and organize it into columns. Divide the 24 hours of a day into 15 min units and put them in the rows as shown in figure ???. In the column headings you enter anything you do on the day, e.g. “Sleep”, “Meeting”, “Write”, “Eat”, “Chat” etc.
Now as you go through the day, for every 15 min make a dot in the column for the activity you actually were engaged in . Try to be as precise as possible, we want to get a true account of how we are treating time. At the end of the day, we can count the dots and see how much time we spent on each of the activities. Then we can divide each column count by 96 (24 hours x 4) to get the percentage of the time we have spent on each activity.
This will give us a clear overview over what we are doing with our time. To analyze the time log we should ask ourselves the following questions:
Did I have each day planned out in the beginning?
Does my actual time spent reflect my plannings?
What did I do that I shouldn't have done at all?
Would I have been more effective if I did it at another time?
Was there a chance to delegate the task to someone else?
Did I reach my goals of the day? Did I reach my goals of the week? To what extent?
What could I have done better?
Could I have done it faster?
Could I have done it simpler, using less detail?
Am I satisfied with the end result?
Am I satisfied with the quality?
Did I get interrupted? How important were those interruptions?
How often and how long did I get interrupted?
How did I deal with interruptions? How long did it take me to recover?
How many tasks did I leave unfinished because of interruptions?
Did I spend excessive time on socializing with others? Are those persons important to me?
We can sort our activities into four classes:
Sleep
Duties (e.g. food intake, cleaning, shopping for groceries)
Time spent wisely and effectively
Time wasted
Obviously, we want to have most activities where we spend our time wisely and effectively. For example, simply working doesn't necessarily mean that we are doing useful and effective work.
Tracking your time will help you adjust and fine-tune your time management practices. Track your time spendings over a few days and monitor every activity. Try to be as accurate as possible. This will open your eyes and is going to prepare you for the steps ahead.