One of the greatest single problems of people today is “time poverty.” Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they feel. This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill can lead to reactive lifestyle; Instead of clearly deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around you. And soon, you lose all sense of control and your life begins to run you, rather than you running your life.
Meanwhile, you have to stand back and take stock of yourself and what you’re doing regularly. You have to stop the clock and do some serious thinking about whom you are and where you are going. You must master your time rather than becoming a slave to the constant flow of events and demands on your time. And you must organize your life to achieve balance, harmony, and inner peace.
Taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure. Your ability to think is the most valuable trait that you possess. Improve the quality of your thinking and improve the quality of your life.
Time is our most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing that we have. It is perishable, irreplaceable and cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from low value activities to high value activities. All work requires time. Taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will really improve your time management.
I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a calculator or a cellular telephone. It was something that you used so that you could get more done in a shorter period of time and eventually be paid more money. Then I learned that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.
3 Major Goals for Time Management
Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through what is really important to you in life. And it only makes sense if you organize it around specific things that you want to accomplish. You need to set goals in three major areas of your life.
1. Family and personal goals.
These are the reasons why you get up in the morning, work hard and upgrade your skills, worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your time. Achieving these family and personal goals are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.
2. Business and career goals.
These are the “how” and “why” goals. How can you achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals? How can you develop the skills and abilities to stay on top in your career? Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when balanced with family and personal goals.
3. Personal development goals.
You can’t achieve much more on the outside than what you have achieved on the inside. Your outer life is only a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you want to build your life. According to Brian Tracy, “The greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve”. But, you must work on yourself and never stop.
Having listed your goals, organize it by priority. Your time management will only begin for you once you decide very clearly your priorities. You must decide on the most important things that you could possibly be doing to give yourself the same amount of happiness, satisfaction, and joy in life. On the other hand, note those things that are important but not urgent and squeeze time to do them before they become urgent.
How to Manage Your Calendar
I know that your calendar is full and you have no spare time. True. Your time is extremely valuable. Therefore, for you to do anything new, you will have to stop doing something old. In order to get into something, you will have to get out of something else. In order to pick something up, you will have to put something down. Before you make any new commitment of your time, you must firmly decide what activities you are going to discontinue in your personal life. If you want to spend more time with your family, for example, you must decide what activities you currently engage in that are preventing you from doing so.
There is a principle of time management that says hard time pushes out soft time. This means that hard time, such as working, will push out soft time, such as the time you spend with your family. If you don’t get your work done at the office because you don’t use your time well, you almost invariably have to rob that time from your family. As a result, because your family is important to you, you find yourself in a values conflict. You feel stressed and irritable. This is common in our lives, watch it!
3 Time-check Questions
There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually to help maintain your personal life and time balance.
1. “What is really important to me?”
Whenever you find yourself with too much to do and too little time, stop and ask yourself.
2. “What are my highest value activities?”
In your personal life, what are the things that you could do that will give greatest value to your life?
3. “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”
Since you can only do one thing at a time, you must constantly organize your life so that you are doing one thing, the most important thing, at every moment.
In all, time management enables you to choose what to do first, what to do second, and what not to do at all. It enables you to organize every aspect of your life so that you can get the greatest joy, happiness, and satisfaction out of everything you do. It is not a skill you should possess, it is a lifestyle.
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