Guide to Effective Time Management

February 14, 2008 · Filed Under Personal Development 
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Time Management

Previously I wrote a post that talks about the law of cause and effect. In that post, I said that everything happens in this world has its own reasons. If you want to succeed, then you have to build the causes that bring you there and this is all about how you spend your time every day.

Time Management is very important. Effective time management can let us accomplish more tasks in less time. If you want to succeed faster, then a better time management skill is a must for you.

 

Benefits of Effective Time Management

Below are some of the benefits of time management that I found from my own experience:

  • Have a clear mind about what you should do at a particular time
  • Better preparation as you know what you will do in next few hours
  • Reduces negative emotion such as stress, anxiety, worries and etc.
  • Get things done and more focus on your goal.
  • You can start multi-tasking and accomplish more tasks.
  • Have more Motivation because you feel that you are approaching your goal.

If you never have any kind of plans to manage your time, then you should consider planning one for yourself as it really helps you a lot in long run.

 

My Ways to Effective Time Management

I have a lot of goals and tasks that I have to accomplish from time to time. All of them are mainly set for both my offline and online businesses. So time management is very important for me.

Below are some of the tips that I can give you based on my experience and what I am doing daily in my time management:

  1. Set a goal first. Goal is the direction for us and it is the point that we focus on in time management. What I do is I make yearly goals and split them to monthly, weekly and daily goals. So my time management is mainly focusing on monthly, weekly and daily goals. If you want to know more about goal setting, you can read my post – How to Set a Goal, Build A System for It and Achieve It.
  2. List down the Tasks. Now we set our goals and the next step is listing down all the tasks that help us to achieve our goals. Please do not list too many tasks and make sure your listed tasks as simple as possible. According to my experience, we will easily feel overwhelmed if we list too much of tasks and all the tasks are complicated. Our mind will think that it is hard to take action and hence our old habit, procrastination, will come out and block us. Simple is the point here.
  3. Categorise your tasks. I usually categorise my tasks into 4 categories to improve my productivity:
    • High profit/urgent
    • High profit/not urgent
    • Low profit/urgent, and
    • Low profit/not urgent
  4. Plan the schedule in advance. Time to plan your schedule. Maybe you feel that a schedule will make your life boring as everything is fixed. However, for me, schedule is just like a guide that tells me what I should do at a particular time. Once I set it, all I have to do is follow it and it will bring me to success. This also helps me to have a clear mind and not overwhelmed with all the tasks. Every weekend, I will start planning my next week with a daily schedule. In my schedule planning, I will fix a few hours every day to concentrate on the tasks that listed in the categories of High Profit/urgent and High Profit/Not Urgent. I tell myself that no matter what happen, I definitely will spend time on tasks from those 2 categories. In fact, only the tasks in those 2 categories can help me to achieve my goals. The funny thing is, in some cases, if you manage to finish the tasks, all the tasks in the other 2 categories will be solved too. So you set a few hours, especially the hours that you are highly effective for these important tasks. After that, you can set your schedule according to the urgency of the remaining tasks.
  5. Be flexible but not easily compromise. Sometime our life is hard to be predicted. There are a lot of incidents might happen in our daily life. So be flexible in your time management and schedule. However, please do not be so flexible until you skip those important and high profit tasks. Please do not compromise easily with outside factors and give up the important tasks. They are very important and in some cases, you have to say NO to protect them. For example, you set 7pm as your exercise time. However, you receive a call from a friend asking you for drinks at the same time. Then you have to say no or change the time in order to protect your exercise time which is important for your healthy goal.  

 

Do you have a better suggestion?

Do I miss out something? Do you have a better suggestion or ideas on time management? Please share it with me, I am ready to learn from you with open minded. :)


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    Comments

    One Response to “Guide to Effective Time Management”

    1. ChampDog on February 17th, 2008 8:50 pm

      I think you have covered it well. :) I think in practical the most critical or difficult is the step 3 - Categorize your tasks or I usually call it prioritize your tasks. Especially in business, it is not that simple to identify which tasks are actually high profits or not. We really don’t know in certain situation. What the best we can do is to give it the best guess.

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