Time Management: a few quick tips

2009 February 6
tags: ,
by Taylor

Here are a few tips regarding time management, taken from Sean Mize, expert author. I wanted to share these to encourage those who feel as I do this week (or month really) completely swamped and/or overwhelmed. Hopefully we will all learn a little from this simple but truthful advice on how to take control of our time and get the full value out of our 24 hours.

1) Eliminate time wasters in your life. What are you spending your time doing… that you shouldn’t be? Until you learn to cute these wasteful minutes out — you wont be able to use your time efficiently.

A perfect example of this in my opinion is TV. The majority of American’s spend WAY too much time watching TV. This must be limited for you to achieve ultimate control over your time. You’re probably watching way too much, so cut it out. The least you can do is improve the value of TV that you watch and only allow time for news or somewhat valuable or educational programming.

2) Decide what is important. Make a list of what is genuinely important in your life. What comes first? In what order? How much time are you willing to give to each of these important things, and if something must be bumped off, what will it be? One of the keys to time management, the most critical and often the most difficult, is prioritization—you absolutely must know what you want to accomplish before you can go do it. I waist a lot of time trying to decide what ORDER my to do list should go in, but this is something you need to do to start crossing things off. It is NOT effective time management to jump from task to task sporadically, and your work will probably not be as focused if you handle your tasks this way. Today’s world has too many distractions and when you allow those distractions to become priority, you lose efficiency.

• Make of list of what you want to accomplish

• Set time frames for accomplishing each item

• Organize each item in order of importance

• Create a game plan

3) Focus on managing your time (focus on your list) If you’re not thinking about how you can be efficient, chances are — you wont be! Begin to focus on your time management throughout the course of your day. Once you have determined what your priorities are start focusing on them. If something isn’t on your list — Don’t do it, until your list is completed. If you are distracted by something that should be a goal, put it on your list, and wait until you come to it, don’t be a slave to your distractions.

from → thoughts

  • http://larrymckeogh.typepad.com/ Larry McKeogh

    Good overall concept of time management Taylor. One other thing to consider is understanding where you spend your time. So often we think one thing but in reality it is actually quite different.

    For example, 10 minutes to read a blog or public interest story is not a lot. Do it 10x per week and it can add up to nearly 2 hrs. But do you remember all 10x? There are plenty of unobtrusive tools that track and enable you to see where you are actually spending your time. A couple I use are wakoopa and RescueTime. I am slightly embarrassed each time I open them since the scales are not how my mind added up my efforts.