How do you manage your time?
1. Always define your objectives as clearly as possible.
Do you know what marks a successful man from unsuccessful ones? Successful man knows where he has to go. He has a desired destination and he draws a plan to achieve it. The point is that is you set your goals and objectives, you can plan your daily activities and can include them in your “to do” list. You might find yourself not doing any thing because your goals are not set. So plan your goals.
2. Analyse your use of time.
If you time and again probe yourself with questions like “What is the most important use of my time, right now?” it will help you to focus on ‘important tasks’. Further you should analyse how you use your time. You shall have to identify your time wasters and try to avoid wasting time on them. For eg, if you do a self analysys you may find out that you are wasting a lot of time on activities such as bathing, eating or over the telephone or just day dreaming.
3. You should have a plan.
You must have a strategy to win a battle. No battle or war can be won without any plan or stategy so how do you expect to acheive your goals without a plan. Most people know what they want but have no plan to achieve it except by sheer hard work. Your yearly plan should be reviewed daily and reset as your achievements are met. Successful people make lists constantly. It enables them to stay on top of priorities and enable them to remain flexible to changing priorities. This should be done for both personal and business goals.
4. Action plan analysis.
Problems will always occur, the value of a good plan is to identify them early and seek out solutions. Good time management enables you to measure the progress towards your goals because “What you can measure, you can control”. Always try to be proactive.
Time management (or self management) is not a hard subject to understand, but unless you are committed to build time management techniques into your daily routine you’ll only achieve partial (or no) results and then make comments such as “I tried time management once and it doesn’t work for me”. The lesson to learn is that the more time we spend planning our time and activities the more time we will have for those activities. By setting goals and eliminating time wasters and doing this everyday you may find you will have extra time in the week to spend on those people and activities most important to you.
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