Time is very precious and time that flies can never come back. This is why there is a saying that time and tide wait for none. You may be a housewife, student, teacher, salesman, executive or may be self-employed. But how you manage your time is really important.
Prepare a checklist for your daily activities. Most of the time we are busy throughout the day and we keep on working and there are never ending jobs for us. We keep saying we do not have time and there are many pending jobs. The secret is if you manage your time well, all your jobs can be completed quickly and there is time for you to have a cup of coffee in between of your jobs and that is the real art of time management. In order to save our time we need to follow few important techniques and practice them continuously.
Firstly, prepare a checklist for activities on every day basis. At the end of the day, review your checklist and keep checking how many are performed and how many are pending.
Keep a diary or a note pad and write all activities briefly how did you perform them.
Ensure the easy activities to be performed first and tough jobs can be done in the last, because these may take a little longer time.
Do not make an over assessment of yourself or your energies but keep a limitation of spending your energies and skills and use them accordingly. This will develop your confidence levels and will help you to achieve more.
Keep the busy activities in the week days and keep those lengthy activities for your week end. Because you are definitely in the mood to clean your home in the weekend whether it may be a garage cleaning or gardening or vacuum of your home.
Please set your time limit for each activity upto twenty minutes and not more than that because it is your weekend and you need to prepare for the next week. Keeping this in mind, complete the jobs as soon as possible.
Similarly assign a good time for your children and spend time in chatting, playing and in cooking a good meal for them. This will keep them definitely happy and cheerful.
Gordie
One of the best books I’ve read on time management and productivity is Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. It’s a short simple read and also comes on audio. It helped me a lot.
October 4, 2010 at 2:58 pm
MRWED
I like the idea of having a checklist of what to do at work or even doing home chores, in this way I will be guided of what to do first and how to do it. At the end of the day I always have a summary of what I have done and what things I should do.
October 19, 2010 at 12:23 am
arina nikitina
Hi Ririan! Thanks for this post… some more ideas to add with my existing practices on time management. That means, even more ideas to share to others who need it!
I’ve always stressed on the importance of checklists or the “things-to-do-today” list, apart from weekly planners and calendars… they help keep track of how we have fared, the things that we tend to forget, and a good measurement for points where we need to congratulate ourselves for keeping pace with planned activities.
But lately, I also had to stress the value of a “workable, short checklist” because some readers are making really long, long lists filled with trivial to-dos. I had to remind them that long lists are intimidating, thus, gives us a reason to procrastinate, and a source excuses why we become disorganized and unfocused.
Still, this post would truly enlighten so many people! I hope I did my part of sharing some personal insights as well.
Keep it up!
October 21, 2010 at 1:37 am