Time Management - How To Use Your Environment To Your Advantage

By Michael Adams in Time Management on May 10th, 2008

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by Michael Adams

Time management for many of us seems to be full of un-fun things like following a boring process, mental discipline, stale techniques to help avoid procrastination so we can be more productive with our time.

Sure all of those things can and do work, but at what cost? Wouldn’t it be more fun to learn other ways of improving your time management that cost very little in terms of time and mental discipline? Let’s skip those “Brute Force Time Management” techniques and instead try something easier.

Buckminster Fuller (or “Bucky Fuller” as he was called by his friends) is reported to have said “Environment is stronger than will power”. Sounds smart, doesn’t it? Consider this. If you’re out of shape and want to improve your health, how hard would that be to do if you’re locked in room full of delicious sugar cookies. On the flip side, how easy would that be to do if you lived inside of a fitness center? Pretty easy don’t you think?

This same sort of idea goes for almost everything, yet most people don’t think about setting up the right environment for efficient time management. In fact, most people kind of think of anything having to do with time management as a chore. Let’s turn that around.

From wherever you’re at, look at what you can see around your workspace. Pick a few simple items around the room and ask you’re the question “Do these items support my time management and productivity goals or do they steal my energy from reaching those goals?”

If the element you’re looking at doesn’t support your time management efforts, eliminate it from your environment right then and there.

Most people have at least one element they should toss. Oddly enough, when doing this exercise, people suddenly see their television as a major distraction. Something that not only slows their productivity, but which also can completely destroy your ability to accomplish your daily goals. If you have a television in your work space, unplug it and move it out of the room.

A messy desk full of papers can be another distraction from your productivity and efforts for better time management. Just ask yourself the simple question of whether having a messy desk supports your productivity or detracts from it. Beyond aesthetics, a messy desk makes it harder to find your important papers and can cost you more time as you have to hunt to find them. Help yourself out, clean up your desk!

I used these two mundane and simple because they are easy to understand and get the point across. The basic idea is to get rid of anything your work space that doesn’t help you reach your time management goals.

If we were to take this one step further, the next step would be to improve your environment by actually adding things which add to and make it easier for you to accomplish your time management efforts. We’ll share hints on how to do this in other articles.

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For additional tips and hints about time management, make sure you check out Michael Adams’ exclusive free report on tips for managing your time and multi-million dollar projects.