Time management is a skill necessary for success. It involves one’s ability to plan and coordinate how one spends irreplaceable hours daily. Time as they say is no man’s friend, neither is it controlled by humans. It passes as fast as it wants, and as humans all we can do is to make the most out of time, by managing it effectively.
Not doing things at the right time is as a result of poor time management, and procrastination is a major outcome of lack of proper time management. However the time management skill, is a skill that can be possessed and developed by obtaining other sub skills, which will be highlighted in the following paragraphs
These sub-time management skills involves setting realistic goals, planning for the future, prioritizing tasks, and having a time schedule, which involves monitoring how your time is being spent daily.
It’s very necessary to create efficient techniques for time management, in order to balance the rather conflicting demands of time in regards to the numerous activities going on in our individual lives.
To successfully manage your time involves accomplishing the most pressing activity at the moment. Most of the time, is advisable to rank activities in order of priority. This helps you to achieve what you truly want as well as being in control of your time and feeling fulfilled with yourself.
Often times, your inability to manage your time can lead to you getting a feeling of incompetence and doubt in your own capability. Hence being able to manage your time can give you psychological supremacy over your life and environment.
The first step to take in managing your time effectively is having a to-do-list, which is a reminder system that tells you when you need to do a certain activity. You are not a machine, so don’t stress your head by trying to remember different information. Trying to recall too much will only put you in distress and confusion. A good remedy is creating an overview of all your activities either in a day, week, month or year. Document these activities and their time frames in a way you understand. The advantage of this technique is to help you distinguish between important and un-important things, which will ensure you don’t forget tasks. Also it assists in arranging your thoughts, giving you a larger picture of the tasks ahead.
Always try and understand yourself and where you’re heading. Paying attention to constant varied movements in your energy levels, both physically and mentally all the time is a good habit to nurture in order to organize or reorganize your tasks.
Set goals! You can never go wrong with setting goals; it makes all your tasks less rigorous and gives you a direction as well as an avenue to track your achievements. To do a proper goal setting, analyze your present reality, examine the goals that are important to you and the steps needed to achieve these goals.
While setting your goals make sure you prioritize, this determine how urgent each goal is and divide them into categories of importance. Prioritizing makes you more effective and boosts your concentration on more important tasks. For example if you have set a particular time for a given task, ensure you spend that exact time on the task. If you can’t meet up with the set time, get help and move to the next activity in line.
If you possess the bad habit of procrastinating, then your time management skills will be on the low side. Start taking decisions and follow them with actions. Always remember tomorrow never comes, so always do what you can today.
In general, time management deals with identifying areas of your life where time is being wasted, reducing this time wastage and channeling it to more important as well as productive activities.
photo credit; creativelive.com
