6 Ways You Can Master Time Management Skills
The clutter we experience in our daily lives causes us to become more reactionary instead of proactive. The purpose of this article is to walk through a few valuable practices for managing your time and to help you maintain a positive and proactive lifestyle.
1. Use A Time Planner
The first time management technique that you can use is a time planning system that contains everything you need to plan your life and improve your organizational skills. A good time planner will contain a master list where you can capture every task, goal, and required action as it comes up. The next part of your system is a daily list. This daily list is perhaps the single most important planning tool you can have. Some people call it a ‘‘to-do list.’’
2. Generate a Daily Schedule
Every night before you go to bed, write out a detailed schedule for your next day. It is crucial to not only include the “usual” tasks but purposefully add the more creative endeavors you seemingly never get to. The most important thing is once you make the schedule that makes sense for you, stick to it!
Once you have written up your daily lists and begun work, new tasks and responsibilities will come up. Telephone calls will have to be returned. Correspondence will have to be dealt with. An item that is written down on the list next to all your other tasks and responsibilities often doesn’t seem so important after all.
3. Schedule Relaxation
Whatever your method of relaxing, it is imperative to add recreational time in your daily schedule. Whether you take a walk after lunch, get a massage, see your chiropractor or talk/email with your friends make sure you not only leave time for it but do it! Remember the 80/20 rule of time management, which tells us that 80 percent of the importance of what we do on any given day lies in only twenty percent of the activities.
Therefore, if you focus on accomplishing the top twenty percent of the most important tasks, you will feel more productive and satisfied at the end of the day.
4. Prioritize
Next to each bullet-point item, assign an “A” if this is a “must do” item for today, a “B” for “should do” and a “C” for “could do.” For large projects, break it down into small parts and prioritize. Divide-and-conquer. It has been well said that " “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.”, which legally fits in with this situation!
5. Improve Your Organizational Skills With A File System
This is a wonderful time management system that you can also use with hanging files in your desk drawer.When you have an appointment or responsibility for six months from now, you simply drop it into that monthly file. At the beginning of each month, you take out all of your responsibilities for that month and sort them into your daily files, numbered one through thirty-one.
Each day, you take out the file for that day, and that becomes the starting point of your planning.This time management system takes a few minutes to set up. It then assures that you constantly improve your organizational skills and never miss or forget to follow up on a distant call, task, or appointment.
