Time Management

[ Time Management Can Decrease Your Stress ]

“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it but you can use it. You can’t
keep it but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it
back.” – Harvey MacKay -  Managing your time wisely leads to
more productivity, meeting deadlines, more time with
friends and family, less stress, better focus, an
organized lifestyle, and also provides you
a feeling of control over your life.

First Step to Time Management

To use your time more efficiently, you must set goals for yourself. These
will be things you want to accomplish on a daily, weekly, monthly,
or even yearly basis. This is the first place to start for time
management because when you have goals, then
you must use your time wisely to achieve
those goals. Goal setting makes time
management a necessity in life.

Types of Goals

Goals are short-term, long-term, and what I call “forever” goals. A project
with a deadline of one week can be considered a short-term goal. A
long-term goal is something like graduating school in three
years or creating a business. These long-term goals
will have short-term goals that will help you
achieve it. “Forever” goals can be eating
healthy or more time with family.

Prioritize your Goals

Time management is all about working smart instead of working hard.
Prioritizing your goals allows you to focus on important projects
first; Projects that are short-term or have due dates. Make
a list of things you need to finish. Figure out which
ones need the most attention now and which
ones can be dealt with later. This helps
you establish what’s important.

When deciding which goals should have the highest priority, consider their
consequences also. Some may have upcoming due dates but little
consequences if not done in time. Others may be due later
but will cause major issues if not finished on time.
You might consider making these a priority.
If others are impacted if you finish late,
take that into consideration too.

Using a Planner

Time management is much simpler now with the evolution of technology.
I’ve found Google Calendar to be the best free planner available.
It’s easy to create, edit, and share your schedule with any
person. You can sync this with most phones so your
schedules always on hand. Alerts and offline
access are available. Time management
is more effective with this free tool.

Beating Procrastination

Managing your time efficiently is not possible without action. You can set
goals, prioritize and make a schedule but if you don’t follow it, you
will fail at successful time management. Keep in mind that
once you let tasks go by unfinished, you will have to
change your whole schedule to make time for
them. Beat procrastination by focusing
on positive results, not the work.