Time Management

I t’s important to understand the value of time or we can all too easily let time slip away – but the answer is not to try and cram in more than will fit! It’s pretty easy to let time management linger in the back of our minds as something we should do, but simply can’t find the time.

Does this sound familiar? A long morning run before watering and weeding the plants, before going off to an eight-hour work day (plus commute time), a lunch meeting, a 3 p.m. presentation where you’ll need to be fresh and alert, a dental appointment after work, grocery shopping, cooking, an evening tennis game, reading, TV, thinking guiltily about that craft or woodworking project you started in 1998…. And what about unscheduled time-consumers, such as searching fruitlessly for the right-size coffee filter? Or reluctantly taking that phone call from an old windbag friend who has won more talk-a-thons than you have won tennis matches?

If this sounds like a day in your life – or if (tell me it’s not so) you wish your schedule could be this “relaxed,” then you have hit the wall, and have probably bounced off it a few times. You are in task overload and it’s time to apply some time management skills to help you gain back those wasted hours.

So, do you acknowledge that you could benefit from learning to better your time management? Good! You’ve completed step one and you are ready to delve headlong into It’s Your Time, where time management is as easy as one through seven.

Now that you have completed step one, it’s time to determine the factors that have been preventing you from applying better time management skills and organizing the space around you.