subject: Essential Guidelines on How to Manage Time [print this page] Essential Guidelines on How to Manage Time
Sometimes it can be an overwhelming feeling with all the duties and tasks that need to be accomplished during a regular day, often as a consequence of insufficient time management. Do you feel frustrated after a stressful business day, because of not being able to spend your time with your family, friends and the people you like the most? Sometimes even a 24 hour day wasn't enough for me to get all the things done and to meet with my friends as I had planned to do, which is why I started to apply time management techniques. Due to the fact that the time we can spend for work, hobbies and friends is limited to 24 hours it is absolutely necessary to have some intelligent time management techniques available that help us to manage time in an effective way. In the following you can find essential guidelines about time management.
Identification of time-wasting activities
The very first step is to identify the activities that are stealing your valuable time, especially those that have no benefit at all, e.g. purposelessly watching TV, etc. At this point it is necessary to be absolutely honest with yourself in order to identify the activities that steal the most of your time, even if they have already become habits. I find it helpful to start writing an activity log, where I write down all the activities I did during a day and how much time I spend for these. After you have tracked down all the activities of one week you can take some time and try to evaluate the importance of those activities and whether or not it is advisable to scrutinize them.
Eliminate time consumptive activities
After you have identified what hobbies, spare time activities and habits need to be scrutinized you should honestly ask yourself the question if these activities are beneficial for you, e.g. you learn something new or it helps you to improve some of your skills, or whether such an activity should be eliminated if it is purposeless and wastes your valuable time. I highly recommend you to focus on the time consumptive activities that allow you to save the highest amounts of time, if eliminated from your everyday schedule. However, this process can be quite complicated, especially when you are trying to quit habits, which is why I recommend you to reduce the time you spend with this activity continuously.
Scheduling
Prioritizing in the form of scheduling is an important time management technique that is both simple and effective as it allows you to focus on important and urgent tasks, before having to accomplish tasks that are not important or urgent. You can prioritize your work by taking yourself five to fifteen minutes in the morning, that you spend classifying your tasks into "Very Important - Very Urgent" up to "Not Important - Not Urgent". Doing so helps you to accomplish all your high-priority tasks, which is especially helpful whenever you are facing work overload as you can easily put unimportant and tasks that are not urgent aside. This technique furthermore allows you to focus on highly important tasks when you peak concentration, which helps you to avoid carelessness errors.
Power Sessions
The integration of power sessions is an excellent strategy whenever you need to focus your whole attention onto one task, as these sessions allow you to reduce distractions to a minimum. But what is a power session in general? Power sessions are previously defined periods of time, where you make sure that you will not be interrupted by any means, which allows you to focus with all your attention on your given task. It is important to make preparations that you will not be interrupted by your telephone, email or the internet, during these periods. Power sessions allow you to increase the quality of your work and more important, they allow you to get more things done within shorter amounts of time.
When applying time management strategies you will often have to choose between pleasurable activities that might waste your time and tasks that simply need to be done! Be sure to make the right choice that helps you to spend more time with your family and friends.
