Understanding the Importance of Time Management Part 2

A to-do-list: Make and keep lists. It’s so much easier on your mind to get things out of your head and onto paper than burdening yourself with the task of remembering every single detail of what has to be done. This is especially useful if you’re super busy.

Setting priorities: Here’s how to work most effectively. As you are planning your day, first put everything to be accomplished on paper. Then, prioritize the activities with the most important task coming first and the least important task coming last. Work on the most important things first until completion. Then move on to the next task on your list. At the end of the day, no matter what, you will have worked on the first activity on your prioritized list. Incidentally, the apparent difference between high efficient people and low productivity people is how they manage their activities within the allotted time.

Goal setting: Goal setting is important in managing your activity to be done within the fixed time. Daily, weekly or monthly goals as the case may be will help you allocate time to the specific goals, which of course will help you know how your time is spent and how much can be accomplished.

Action plan: Someone said failing to plan is planning to fail. No one builds a house without first calculating how much it will cost, before jump-starting the building only to discover the lack of resources. To save time there must be action planned to getting the task done from the initial stages to the final stages.

Delegate: This is a method of sharing responsibility with eligible people with a view to enabling you focus your attention on and dedicates yourself to major issues within the framework of the activity to be accomplished. Learning to delegate tasks that can be done by others will free you up some time to concentrate on and get the most done.

Decision: Between you and the corresponding action to be taken is the decision to take action. You find that a lot of activities are left undone just because of indecision. As a result time is wasted. So as to manage your time a clear decision should be made and take action. Like NIKE; just do it.

Procrastination: This is one of the enemies of time management. You always have to push activities that should be done now forward or put on hold until it has piled up to the point where the stacks of things to be done is daunting to say the list.