Time Management Articles

Fundamental things in life make our lives work well for us. Time management is one of those basic and fundamental considerations without which you cannot achieve anything in life. When you have more time at your disposal, you can enjoy anything in life your heart pines for – quality time spent with your family, friends; time for your own indulgences and things you care for.

We can never predict our tomorrows. There are uncertainties around everything in life. It’s nearly impossible to know exactly how our future days are shaped; we can only plan to a certain extent.  Planning is an integral part of time management. Even plans are no rigid block of ideas – they are dynamic and open to changes. That’s why it is crucial to prioritizing the things you need to accomplish, more so, completing them in a manageable time frame. When you’re done with a certain task, it motivates you to move on to completing the next one.

Planning can be done by taking notes and making lists, in order to sort through your tasks to be accomplished. Prioritizing things set the picture clear for you.

Dealing with Correspondences at Work

Always move away from clutter. If you have to deal with excessive number of emails, on a regular basis, (your job may require you to do a lot of your business through email and the Internet) know how to sort them well. Certain messages such as customer contacts, contracts, and other important communication need to be retained, and a convenient way to get this stuff done is through email.  Spam is a deterrent and you can get trouble form junk emails.  You can avoid Spam through using separate communication address for personal emails or Web surfing.

Make sure you put your emails in a folder, in order to prioritize your various types of messages, and for quick reference. Organize important communications for long-term, and delete messages you no longer need. Modern technology offers companies managing programs that work to save time. You have databases to store and maintain valuable information. While storing information on the database, be sure to delete or store old files in a different area, so you can save time.

Take Notes and Save Time

Wish to save chunks of time – take notes that are short and direct. Crisp and short notes don’t require too much of their own organization! Referring to notes helps people stay organized and on task, especially if they attend many meetings.

While you take notes before and after the meetings, you can work as per the game plans and better communicate your goals and ideas to the co-workers.
If you’ve good basics on time management, it helps you prepare for the demands of work, as well as every other realm of your personal life.

Think of a grocery shopping experience, you have the choice of paper or plastic grocery bags. While paper is the common mode of packaging, plastic has become popular these days. Most people use plastic because that is what is offered. If you like, you can still prefer paper over plastic. That makes a unique combination of your desire pattern, shopping habit, preferences and life style. You’ll notice that there are few who bring their own environmentally-friendly cloth bags to the grocery store every week.

If you think that this paper or plastic debate has nothing to do with time management, think again. The choices offer the analogy that with changing times, options to time management have changed too. Choices are still yours to make. What works for someone else may not work for you, because you have distinctive needs and requisites.

Modern time management techniques have changed in pattern, offering a multitude of choices for each of us to implement. You will get paper products such as wall calendars, desk calendars, spiral bound planners and loose-leaf organizers to organize and schedule your tasks. Even software programs are there to keep track of time – PC software tools, website utilities, PDAs and even cell phones have added to the possibilities. You can find virtually n number of options to explore and decide on. Determine and shape up your choices as per your individual needs.

Why do you need to schedule your precious time – to make most of it! Scheduling of your time for optimum productivity also comes in mind-blowing options. Prioritize your tasks and think of the times you are at your productive best. Do you think you get more done when you start a task and stick to with it all day long without being distracted? However, there’s always little bit for distraction to handle! Alternatively, do you prefer to complete a big assignment in smaller steps and do multiple, different tasks in a day? Morning hours are preferred by some people to carry out the jobs, while some people prefer keeping late nights – for them those tranquil hours are the most productive slots. So, what defines your choices? Evaluate and work out what fits your needs best and then plan accordingly.

To manage and get most of your time at hand, you need to choose what tools and management style work for you as an individual. Look at your problems and priorities the way others cannot, don’t try to do it someone else’s way. It’s almost like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. That will lead you to an overwhelming feeling of chaos. Always stick to your ways, invent them, adapt to them, doing things your way actually makes scheduling a little more fun and less stressful!

Many of us like to postpone our works for a future date that never comes. Procrastinating people masters the art of doing nothing. That leads to more tasks in the line, more stress and low productivity. The problem of procrastination affects a person’s ability to function in a motivated sense and it interferes with the person’s ability to complete assignments in a timely manner. Procrastination, no doubt meddles with productivity. Procrastinating people seldom perform well at a job. Usually, the problem of dilly dallying comes as the result of many years of laziness that thickens into a long-formed habit. Procrastinators are people who feel that they have not the guts to square up to the job right now and they reassign it to some vague moment in the future. They do not want to experience failure, so they put off the work until the last possible moment.

Procrastination and Stress:

When you procrastinate, it gives you some momentary relief at the cost of huge stress on your platter. Performing tasks and different assignment is stressful enough with having to worry about putting things off until the last possible minute. Procrastination brings you lot of headache and tensions in a row, so if you’ve been procrastinating so long, put on the reality check. Procrastination mostly triggers a person’s psychological make-up in which a person’s mind allows them to think that it’s alright to put off work.

Stop Procrastination – Change Your Attitude:

Ways to deal with procrastination may include hypnotherapy as well. Hypnotherapy, or hypnosis as it’s referred to the other times, is a treatment that influences the subconscious state of your mind. A hypnotherapist’s job is to help you change the way your brain works. The therapist takes the blocks off of your brain as you will learn how to think with clarity. More so, hypnosis is known to help issues like procrastination because while under hypnosis the person relaxes and it takes the stress off that person. A more relaxed worker will always get more work done than a very tense worker with lots of stress.

There are people who want to quit smoking but they’re still to get rid of the cigarette butts. People need professional help when things get out of their control. Procrastination is a pretty normal thing for people. It just becomes a problem when it’s the norm rather than the exception to the rule. Hypnosis can bring a change in thinking with positive stimulus and feedbacks. If you need to get over the problem of procrastination, best way is to introspect and change your thought-patterns. Habits are hard to die – still if one tries hard he/she can change the way their mind process work.

Internet marketers have a hell lot of work to do, right from doing the researches, networking and other online tasks. Managing time becomes crucial for them, no doubt. This is especially true for those that are working part time at home. The ancillary and unnecessary tasks eat up most of their business times. One might just wonder how anyone gets marketing done online with so much distraction on the platter!

If you are an Internet marketer, they are the few basic time management tips to keep in mind when you sit down to your computer every day.

1.    Make To-do Lists and Keep Your Focus on

There’s nothing more effective than a to-do list in front of you. It keeps you reminding of your tasks and that there are things you have to accomplish today. That helps to realize your goals and make your business grow more. Make a ‘MUST DO’ list of the things ahead of other assignments. Create signs, cues, pictures, sing songs, whatever it takes to keep you focused. Move your way down the list until you finish.

2.    Take a Break

At times, you feel tired and a lot distracted. When things are not encouraging or there’s something you are working on that you just get distracted, think of taking a pause. Move on to the next task for a little while. If not, have a little rest and then come back later when you feel refreshed and more in tune.

3.    Break Tasks in Bread Crumb like Chunks

Always break your tasks in smaller ones, while you are working on a seemingly overwhelming task. You might feel that you are getting nowhere. Think about it, have you started procrastinating, or keep transferring the same task from today’s list to that of next day’s? Breaking tasks in small plans can easily be marked off your list so that even at a glance it seems like you’ve accomplished something, at the day’s end.

4.    Record How much Time You Spent for Each work

Keep track of the time spent on a certain task that helps you to plan for future.
Online businesses are not built in an overnight’s time; you need to keep that in mind. While you are designing action plans or keeping focus with your tasks do not become too overwhelmed or feel overworked. There’s a good many ways you can set your pace, only if you know when to stop. Take your time and cut yourself some slack if you don’t get things accomplished as fast as you have predicted them when you’ve started.

Procrastination is seen as a form of laziness, or putting off things for one sunny morning. We have our share of rainy days too and procrastination takes us closer to that impending crisis. We get so lazy sometimes that we think that we have a long time to accomplish the task, knowing the task can take more time we’ve assumed. People are so prone to work at the last hours, pulling off all-nighters that they just get on their nerves.

Most people fail to avail the golden chances and opportunities in life, only because they’re too lazy to grab them. They get so much tensed and worked up that they fail to hold their patience. It only makes the situations worse and the tasks half-willed and unproductive.  After that they mourn over their procrastination when nothing can be restored. Thus, to emerge successful one needs to get rid of procrastination and this than be done in following manner:

-    First and foremost, if you know that you’re in the habit of dilly dallying, organize your habits.   Start working on them, today. The best way to start is with your room. Tidy up your room, your time, your life and your things. When you are organized, you feel more stable and better willed, thus every time you see anything out of order, you will place it in a proper place. This will imbibe a sense of order in you, and a sense of responsibility, with the passage of time.

-    Make sustainable routines. In your planner, organize your short term and long term goals and the ways to accomplish them. Make a habit of doing the things as listed in your routine and make sure to mention even little household chores in your routine. Initially, you may not be motivated to do them all, but once you start sticking to it, you will imbibe the habit of doing things at specified period of time. This will help you in accomplishing your goals in a timely manner.

-    Take note and conceive your future plans. In the peak of procrastination, you probably sat idle for hours, but if you know what you need to do before hand, a pressure will always be there on you to do the things in timely manner, otherwise all other things will get affected.

-    Manage your time effectively and wisely, that will keep you ahead of procrastination. You need to finish the tasks in the allotted time period and this will organize you as a better performer. More so, when you start managing your time well you will be always left with plenty of time at the end of day allowing you to enjoy things in life you were not able to do earlier.

Change your attitude – An attitudinal shift is all you need to get rid of your procrastinating habits. Build positive and productive thinking towards tasks, think of the ‘now or never’ way of doing things. So that, whenever you feel like skipping the work or task that needs to be accomplished, you get a reality-check! You won’t drag your feet.

Effective time management skills show you how to utilize your time and get a list of things done in a scheduled time frame. People who are able to accomplish all tasks on a list in the given time, they are known to have good time management techniques. So, how to develop good time management skills so that your hours are not wasted and you are ahead of the feeling of failure!

Weaker time management means more worry and more tasks on your back. You can see the problems it would cause if you lack those skills. It could impact your job if you fail to realize goals. There are emotional impacts when we have the feeling of failure, and that we have wasted away a day when we could have been doing something else.

Good time management skills start with a planner. It keeps heed of your everyday activities. Before you start planning in a day to day planner you have to examine the things you are doing to waste time, and eliminate them. Then only go to the next step. Stick to the golden rules of effective time management – and good old common sense. Don’t try to over-plan or achieve something unrealistic. You shouldn’t plan over 168 hours of your week. Make sure you eat and sleep well, and have time for other necessary activities.

Realistic goals are easy to achieve – if you know a project is going to take you 20 minutes, don’t write 15 minutes down.

Employers value people with better time management skills. A squanderer of time is profitable to the workplace, and the boss is not likely to be happy with that outcome. People with poor time management skills are usually deemed lazy and unproductive. It’s hard to hold fast to a job with those qualities on your resume.

Don’t you long for a better life, productive and more rewarding! Consider adopting good time management techniques to reap more time and downsize clutter. Make sure you first start with a goal in your mind and then set off materializing them. Stick to your game plan you have designed for each day. Developing effective time management skills takes some time. That’s why you will need to organize your habits to discard the unproductive ones. When you use your time effectively, you will find yourself feeling less stress, and having more time to enjoy your life, your work, your dreams and desires.

You’ll hardly ever hear someone say they have got enough of time to do all the things they want or need to do. Time is unchangeable and intangible – only our attitudes towards time can be changed to move towards effective time management objectives. As time is not physically manageable itself, we have to learn to manage ourselves, our lives, our workloads, our priorities and our clutter.

Ten inspiring tips on how to make the most with your time –

It helps to say a polite ‘no’ to others who solve their time problems by creating yours.  Make sure you know how and when to decline, and go ahead with the next move.

Set your priorities first. Stick to them. Make sure they are realistic and achievable deadlines.  You are more likely to achieve your deadlines when the people working for your organization are clear about theirs.

Plan the day ahead, and follow through them. If you have already speculated the probable blocks and deadlocks in the plan, you are less likely to be surprised and to have last minute crises preventing you from achieving the plan.

Break your plans as nuggets – to achieve something in every day. When you are finished with a long day’s work and you feel you have worked your socks off but don’t know what you’ve done, you’re less likely to get motivated for the next day.

Your plans must be real ones and not the ‘utopic’ versions – When you have doubts, consider doing a time log for two weeks, so that you know how long it takes to finish. You’ll know the pattern how you usually spend your time.

Start with the difficult and time-consuming tasks, when you are full with energy and gradually promote to easier ones. Motivated, you can take any big or small task in your strides.

While dealing with interruptions, be assertive and decisive, even if it’s a face to face communication or a long distance call.

Stop procrastinating. If so, schedule in ‘worry time’ for the end of each day. Auto-suggestions help – say that you’ll get on and do it now, and won’t worry about it until the allotted time. You’ll learn that you are much ahead of worries!

Less waste means more time. Manage your clutter!  Be kind to people but ruthless with paper. Tidy your desks and see if everything is in its right place. You will be able to perform without distractions, and be able to find things when you need them. Don’t call off things for tomorrow, because tomorrow is another day, and you’re not yet done with today. Prioritize and schedule tasks before another day strikes.

The thought of approaching death overwhelms us all. When we push Mondays through to Fridays, we are left with a feeling that our time’s rushing out. Even if we are overwhelmed at the tasks facing us, we get a rude shock. There aren’t enough hours in the day! If you too get that chill down your spine, knowing how to make most of your time will set you easy.

Learn Ten Mind-boggling Ways to Pick More Time:-

a.    Write down your goals and aspirations, both short and long-term. When you know what to achieve and why you want to achieve it your job is made easy.

b.    Prioritize your goals. You’ll be more productive and profitable if you identify and focus on the priority areas to your business. Work on the fundamentals first. Take action, build strong foundations and the rest should follow.

c.    Make notes on your work planner and set aside a chunk of time for your priority actions. That will keep you updated and stop the butterflies in your stomach while you’re approaching deadline.

d.    Good support systems save you time. Create effective filing systems, systems for management information and communication.

e.    Learn how to say ‘no’ creatively and productively, it is better to check your schedule before committing to anything new. Don’t allow others to divert you from your objectives.

f.    When you are up against a long-term plan, delegate, even if you can do it faster and better. It will save you time in the future, and if done appropriately can motivate your staff, boost their morale and help them develop their skills.

g.    At times, do some ‘reality check’ stuffs. Will your current activity have a positive outcome, or are you doing it to avoid something else? Will doing the task take you closer to your goals? If you are doing something efficiently that should not be done at all, you are wasting your time.

h.    Repeat your success stories. Remember the last big task you have completed and that too with all that flair and finesse, so that you have more fun in your holiday! What strategies and techniques did you employ that made you so effective and focused? What about repeating them!

i.    Effective time management is about life management! Schedule personal activities, so you make time for family, friends, your health and entertainment because having a balanced life relieves stress and increases energy levels.

j.    Face the day with more discipline and well-organized habits. At the end of the working day, tidy your desk, make notes about what needs doing tomorrow and prioritize those tasks. That will set you for the next morning.

No one says he/she has enough time, while in reality dreamers get the same share of time as the doers. We all have exactly the same number of hours per day that were allotted to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson or Albert Einstein.

When we can have control of our lives and selves, we can take control of the things that surround us and influence our lives. Indeed, it is impossible to have control over anything, but we are allowed certain degrees of control over most things that involve us. When you think of implementing an effective time management strategy, you have to zero in on various aspects of life, because all things in life affect us in some way or the other.

When you are alone in the road of time management and pursue all the goals relating to it, you’ll find the road rocky enough. There are people who think time management as something as easy as a pie, when things are far from that. Time management is no quick process. You will notice this, once you start your calculations.

Time management has its own course and route, it has its own stop, go, and yield signs. In order to initiate a time management plan you need to calculate and analyze your plan carefully so that you get rid of the time-wasters, and evaluate where your time is spent most.

You can focus on several areas in life that consume most of your time – factors like family and work. Moreover you have to calculate problem areas like troubles with your computer that may arrive. You have to take stock of the little contingencies, calculate large and small disasters into the equation of time management. There are more miles to go in shaping a good time management path.

There are unending ways to manage time, for we need to include personal factors. While we calculate time management, we have to include details such as, entertainment, relaxation and everything that makes us who we are. If you are spending too much time in one area, you can alter the equation – shift your attention to more important areas instead.

If it takes you a long time in the morning to get motivated you must think about what’s putting you off from getting out of the bed? In most cases, this is caused by procrastinating habit. Start thinking! What takes you so long to get dressed in the morning? Before you are off to sleep, make selection of the suit you’re going to put on the next day, so that when you get up in the morning you only need to dress.

It’s a sheer wastage of time to spend more than 45 minutes while dressing. Move forward, subtract at least 30 minutes from dressing and get on with other areas in your life where your time is either spent well, or wasted.

You can even ask yourself: How well-shaped are your working habits? Do you chat online with someone, or stand around drinking coffee more than often? If your workday means big-time squandering your work-time, you not only waste your company’s resources, you are wasting your time. As long as you lose focus in everything you do, you can never conceive an effective way to time management.

Dilly dallying is a common malady for the students who often struggle with deadlines or even pull all-nighters to dash their assignments off. Procrastination is even worse in the working world. For some students, getting an assignment that is due in a month is no less than challenge. They don’t prefer to slowly work on the assignment, making necessary improvements all along in a month’s time, the way it is supposed to be done. They plan to get to work on, but they never get around to it. They wait for the one-night haul, when they are left pulling an all-nighter so that they can barely make the deadline the next morning. Does that sound familiar – the alarm, the approaching deadline, keeping late nights, and a poorly written paper! If it does, then you probably have a problem with procrastination.

Procrastination is not the prerogative of the world of academia; it’s a familiar name in the working world too. Workers are prone to lose their jobs because he/she did not get to the work in time. Deadlines are missed because a business plan wasn’t given enough consideration early on. Think of the worst scenario, droves of workers sit at their desks and do nothing for hours, just killing time before the clock says that they can go home. Doesn’t that cost businesses severe redundancy and lower productivity?

So, what causes procrastination – is that only a more pressing form of laziness! What is at the root of all of such dilly dallying? Procrastination has to do with the mindsets of people. People are so conditioned to putting off work that after a while, it starts dictating, forming bad habits.

Do you want the grass to grow under your feet? Is it that difficult to stop this terrible habit? It will take a long-lasting concerted effort to truly change your ways. When you do that, you change the way your mind processes work. To deal with procrastination and build better work habits, you can even seek help of a hypnotherapist. By using hypnosis, you can change some of your long-tended habits.

Till date, hypnosis was considered as something associated with parapsychology and paranormal activities; however, hypnosis can have a sustained impact on your overall thinking process. Through hypnosis it is possible to change a person’s basic senses so that they leave permanent traces. When someone has problems with procrastination, he/she needs fundamental attitudinal shift to react to things in different ways. If you want to change your ways and get them to work, move ahead and stop the grass from growing under your feet.