Manage Your Time Successfully
Manage Your Time Successfully – Get More Done with Less Time and Enjoy Your Life
“I get paid not by how many hours I work, but by the importance of the problems I solve.” – Unknown
Happy New Year! In the next twelve months, how would you like to spend your time so that one year from now, you can look back and feel satisfied and accomplished?
The following are some tips I offer in my leadership seminars:
1. Do not confuse busyness with productivity. Highly productive people are often less busy then those who are overworked and overwhelmed.
2. Do not confuse the urgent with the important. Last-minute distractions from yourself and especially others are not necessarily priorities.
3. The key to time management is self-management.
4. Remember the 80/20 rule of time management, which tells us that eighty percent of the importance of what we do in any given day lies in only twenty percent of the activities. Therefore, if you focus on accomplishing the top twenty percent of the most important tasks, you will feel more productive and satisfied at the end of the day.
5. Use a good day planner. The best ones give you at least one full page (or screen) per day, with space allocated for each working hour of the day.
6. Separate obligatory time from discretionary time. In your day planner, block out all the times when you’re committed to others to be at a certain place at a certain time, such as meetings, conferences and other appointments. What’s not your obligatory time is your discretionary time. This is the time you can manage.
7. List: At the beginning of each day, write down a bullet-point list of everything you would like to accomplish that day.
8. Prioritize: Next to each bullet-point item, assign an “A” if this is a “must do” item for today, a “B” for “should do” and a “C” for “could do.”
9. Implement: Focus on accomplishing your “A” list with your discretionary time. Check off each item as they’re complete. With this system, even if you only accomplish twenty percent of your entire list for the day, you still would have accomplished eighty percent of the most important work.
10. What you don’t finish today, transfer to your list for tomorrow and reprioritize.
In conclusion, when we manage our time wisely, we can be at our productive best, so we can enjoy life more and rest!
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Preston Ni is a professor of communication studies, Fortune 500 trainer, executive coach, and organizational change consultant. Write to Preston at commsuccess@nipreston.com, and access free resources at www.nipreston.com.
© 2009 by Preston C. Ni. All rights reserved.
