Successful personal time management
Successful people are good time managers; in fact, they understand that time management is really life management. Time management is self-discipline in action. The purpose of managing your time well is to enhance and improve the quality of your life. The most important things in a person’s life are their health, their peace of mind and their relationships. Life is all about managing your time well so that you can do the things that are most important to you. This means that, it is very important to know what our values and priorities are.
The best way to start is by developing goals and getting clear on what we want to accomplish. It’s been found that, the top 1% of all successful people have very clear written goals. Having done that, we then prioritize our goals and develop the necessary action plans to achieve them. The next step is to prioritize the developed action plans. We utilize such aids as the Pareto Principle in ensuring our effectiveness. This is critical because, taking action without organized plans can be a big waste of time and other resources which leads to failure and under achievement.
After setting our goals and developing the plans of action, it is essential to decide what is relevant and what is irrelevant. Highly effective people focus their time diligently working on the vital few rather than the trivial many, because they know that only the critical 20% account for the 80% of the desired results. Prioritizing is vital in effective time management. Ineffective people work on the trivial many and these things are quite often irrelevant. A good question to constantly ask yourself in order to get the most out your time is, “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?” This question is a productivity and performance enhancer.
Lastly, effective time management demands the activities taken to be value adding. To determine what value a particular action has, ask yourself, “What impact will the accomplishment of this task have on my future?” The future impact of an action is the key in determining its value. When we form the habit of consistently taking value adding actions; this leads to success, more happiness and fulfillment.
The late influential writer and management consultant Peter Drucker used to say, “The worst thing in the world is doing very well what does not need to be done at all.”