Suppose somebody came to you and said, "I will 'give you $86,400 , a day every day, but you must spend it' all each day." You will get, no more and no less every day. You cannot keep it or save it. Wouldn't that be a wonderful gift?
God gives each of us a similar gift 86,400 seconds each day of our lives. We must use up those seconds each day. We cannot keep them or save them. We can throw those seconds away on frivolous pursuits or let them fly by doing nothing.
Or we can use them to develop our minds, to work or to play, to be with our friends and families, to help other people. Use this gift well. It is a gift from God.
In this guide, you'll find tips for better time management, ideas that works best for you depends on your personality, ability to self-motivate, and level of self-discipline. By using these strategies below, you can more effectively learn how to manage your time.
#1. Controlling Or Managing Your Time.
Many of us are unaware of the power we have over controlling our use of time. We are like the poor woman who had lived for all her life in the back country.
She moved to a progressive little village where, to her great surprise, she found that her new home was lighted by electricity. She knew nothing about electricity, had never even seen an electric light before, and the little eight-candlepower electric bulbs with which the house was fitted seemed very marvelous to her.
Later, a man came along one day, selling a new kind of electric bulb, and asked the woman to allow him to replace one of her small bulbs with one of his new style sixty-candlepower bulbs just to show her what it would do.
She consented, and when the electricity was turned on she stood transfixed. It seemed to her nothing short of magical that such a little bulb could give so wonderful a light, almost like that of sunlight.
She never dreamed that the source of the new flood of illumination had been there all the time; that the enormously increased light came from the same current, which had been feeding her little eight-candlepower bulb.
We smile at the ignorance of this poor woman, but the majority of us are far more ignorant of our own power than she was of the power of the electric current.
We go through life using a little eight candlepower bulb, believing we are getting all the power that can come to us, all that we can express or that destiny will give us, believing that we are limited to eight-candlepower bulbs.
We never dream that an infinite current, a current in which we are perpetually bathed, would flood our lives with light, with a light inconceivably brilliant and beautiful, if we would only put in a larger bulb, make a larger connection with the infinite supply current.
The supply wire we are using is so tiny that only a little of the great current can flow through, only a few candlepower, when there are millions flowing past our very door. An unlimited supply of this infinite current is ours for the taking, ours for the expressing.
Our time is like that current. Many of us are content to use it like the eight-candlepower bulb, when we have within us the potential to use our time much more effectively.
Just as changing to a brighter bulb can give us more brilliant light, so can changing our management of time enable us to accomplish much more in our lives
#2. Set Time-Related Goals To Manage Your Time.
The first step in good time management is establishing goals what you wish to accomplish in the allotted time. Unfortunately, many people are action oriented rather than goal oriented. They think only in terms of the immediate action that must be taken, rather than the results that are sought.
A time-related goal is one that relates the importance of what has to be achieved to the corresponding work schedule.
Once these goals are clearly stated, plan your time so that you can give priority to the most important matters, the ones that will help you meet the goals.
Whenever there is a conflict of what to do first, unless the urgency of the situation requires immediate action, the activity that leads to meeting your goals should get the highest priority.
#3. Set Priorities and Stick to Them For Better Time Management.
Charles Schwab, the man whom Andrew Carnegie picked to man age Carnegie Steel, and who was selected to head the new Bethlehem Steel Company, was fond of telling the story of how he learned to manage time.
He consulted Ivy Lee, one of the pioneer management consultants. Some of his famous clients were J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Dupont's, and many giant corporations.
Schwab told him: "I'm not managing now as well as I know how. What we need here is not more knowing but more doing. If you can give us something that will help us do the things we already know we oughtto do, I'll gladly listen and pay you anything you ask."
"Fine," said Lee. "I can give you something right now that will increase your action and doing at least 50' percent." Lee asked. Schwab to write the six most important tasks he had to do the next day and then to number them in order of importance.
He then said: "When you come in tomorrow morning look at item number one and start working on it and don't start any other item until you have completed it.
Then do the same with item two, and then item three, and so on until quitting time.
Don't be concerned if you only finish two or three or even if you only finish one item. You'll be working on the most important ones. The others can wait. Spend the last five minutes of every working day making out a similar list for the next day.
List the items you have not finished and add the new matters that have come up.
Put them in priority order again. You may find that some new items are more important than items from the previous day's list that were not completed, and those previous day's items go back at the bottom of the list.
If this continues to occur, it means that these matters were not important enough for you to do. They either should be dropped or delegated to another person.
"If after several days, you find that if you can't finish all the items by this method, you couldn't have with any other method either, and without some kind of system you probably wouldn't even have decided which were most important.
After you have convinced yourself of the worth of this system, have all the members of your staff use the same system.
Try it for as long as you want and then send me a check for what you think it was worth."
The whole interview lasted twenty-five minutes. In two weeks Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000 a thousand dollars a minute.
Schwab often told people that this lesson was the most profitable he had ever learned. Did it work?
In five years Schwab turned his new company, Bethlehem Steel, into the biggest independent steel producer in the world, making Schwab a fortune of more than a hundred million dollars.
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#4. Make a Master List and Follow It For Better Time Management.
Follow Ivy Lee's advice: Set priorities and stick to them. This is the essential ingredient of effective time management.
Use lists. Start by writing a master list on which you put down everything you want to do. List them as they come to you. Importance is not considered.
Rather than using loose papers, keep a notebook in which you can jot down every item you wish to accomplish.
Review the master list daily. Divide large projects into manageable components. Determine priorities. Which items should be done today; which can be deferred; which can be delegated. Develop a daily list for what you plan to do today and tentative lists for the balance of the week.
Put on your calendar items that are deferred to later times.
Evaluate the daily lists in terms of the importance to meeting your goals.
Schedule time for performing items on the list taking into consideration the urgency of the matter as well as how it will pay out in terms of value to your goals.
By conscientiously following this procedure, you will be able to reprogram your subconscious mind to approach your daily activities in a time-oriented manner and you'll be able to manage your time effectively.
#5. Know Your Energy Levels For Better Time Management.
Each person has levels of energy that vary over the day. Determine your periods of high energy.
Some people work better in the morning; others later in the day.
Some people work better right after eating; others are lethargic for an hour after lunch. Schedule difficult and complex tasks for high-energy times to manage your time properly.
#6. Keep a Time Journal For Better Time Management.
Do you know how you spend your time? Most people have only a vague concept of where the time goes. I have asked this question to countless people. Some had not given much thought to this but had an uncanny innate ability to utilize their time efficiently.
On the other hand, some had set up time journals to record how they were spending their working hours. You may question a busy person's ability to take time out to keep a time journal.
Yes, it is tedious, and sometimes you can be so involved in an activity that it is neither feasible nor appropriate to stop and enter items in a journal.
Realistically, in such a situation, you have to do your best to track your progress in the program, but if you miss recording a segment in your journal, write it up as soon thereafter as possible.
Keeping a time journal is not something you need to do forever. It should be done for at least three or four days each week for about two to three weeks to get a good sampling of how you spend your time.
Then you can study the sheets and analyze just where most of your time is going.
Once you learn in what areas your time is wasted, you can take steps to correct them. Some are easily corrected; others are more complex.
#7. Plagues That Steal Your Time.
You had planned a full day's work. You had it all nicely scheduled.
Now the day is over and only a fraction of what you had planned to accomplish has been done. Where did the time go?
Most likely you tackled the projects on your master list with full intent of completing them, but no sooner had you started than you were hit by one or more of the plagues that steal away our time.
There are dozens of these time robbers.
Review your time journal and you will see what are the most common time robbers that plague you and what we can do to minimize their effects.
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#8. How Mobile Phone Impacts Your Time Management.
You're sitting at your desk deeply engrossed in your work and the phone rings. It is a colleague with a business question. But does this colleague get right down to business?
Not usually. He or she will chat about the weather, his weekend activities, her vacation plans, before starting the business discussion.
The time spent on most business calls could be shortened significantly if callers concentrated only on the business at hand.
However, to eliminate all personal chitchat could have negative effects as well.
A little social conversation smooths the relationships between people and helps develop a more pleasant work environment, resulting in more cooperation and teamwork.
I Keep the social aspect of the conversation to a minimum. If the other person persists in lengthy unrelated discussions, politely say: "I'd love to hear more about that party, but I have a pile of papers here have to get to right away," and then move into the business aspect of the conversation.
Keep calls brief.
Stop scrolling Instagram of Facebook if you want to manage your time in a better way.
#9. Reserve Some Time for Yourself.
All of us have lives outside of our jobs. We need time for families, our nonwork activities, and ourselves. Don't let your job overwhelm you.
Jeff Weinstein of Santa Monica, California, created the Counter, a successful fast-food chain, in which customers can custom build their hamburgers.
As the chain grew, he was working 24/7, with no time for himself and his family. He tried to set up a schedule and to budget his time. He tried not bringing work home. He tried to accomplish it all, but nothing worked, until he finally figured it out. He realized that if he could custom-build burgers, he could also custom-build his time.
The trick, he says, is being fluid, to move seamlessly from one area of life to another.
His schedule includes starting his day by doing something for himself. He goes to the gym before work.
He arrives at work later, but in a better mood, treating coworkers better, making them more productive. He accomplishes more and has more time to enjoy with his family.
One way to build in more time for yourself is to delegate more of the work you usually do to others.
Analyze your workload. You will find that often you are doing work that subordinates are fully capable of doing.
Even though you may truly enjoy that phase of the job, it is far more efficient to let others do it.
#10. Be Patient In Managing Your Time.
Managing time does not mean that things must be accomplished in a rush.
Many real accomplishments are the result of long and patient efforts.
Too many people lack patience. Everything cannot be accomplished immediately. " Can't wait" is characteristic of the century, and is written on everything; on commerce, on schools, on society, on churches.
