Don’t Let Time Get Away From You

By Elliott Roberts in Time Management on April 7th, 2008

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by Elliott Roberts

Time is among the most valuable of resources and all you can do with it is use it. You cannot save it and once spent, you can never get it back. You cannot buy more and you cannot steal it from someone else.

Who wants to run around reacting to situations and putting out fires when being in charge and orchestrating life’s events will lead to more productivity and less stress? To take control of your day and achieve the most out of your life, you need to practice time management, which is one of the simplest forms of self help.

Start out by planning your day ahead of time. The key is to schedule a routine time either first thing in the morning or sometime the night before, and stick with it. Make note of what needs to be done for that day. Set new goals and review those previously set.

Your projects also need start and stop times so that they don’t consume your whole day. The notion of a schedule will help you stay focused, as well. Make a routine for recurring tasks such as managing email and project implementation. Stick to those schedules so that they don’t eat up too much time, as they are tasks that really have no end.

Lastly, take your bigger projects and divide them into smaller more manageable tasks. They will get done quicker because you won’t dread them so much, and your other, smaller tasks will not suffer because of it.

Planning may be key, but acceptance is important too, for even the best made plans can be thwarted by unexpected tasks. Realize that it is okay, deal with the situation and move on. It is so easy to put a small task aside to be completed later, not realizing the pile up you will soon be facing.

Otherwise they will pile up and leave you feeling stressed and overwhelmed. The other big time waster is the time spent starting a new project. There are some things we just do not want to do.

We dread it so we focus on it for a minute, while not really taking any action, then put it aside to waste more of our time later. You know it has to get done, and you will eventually have to deal with it, so either tackle it at the moment or put it aside for a scheduled later time. Then do not think about it again until it is time to work on it.

About the Author:

The Author, Elliott Roberts, is a writer at Becomng, a Personal Development blog that covers issues from software to meditation. Read more Time Management articles here.