Time management is one of the basic skills of our culture! Time is one of the most scarce commodities in your life. It never seems enough, yet, once it passed, you can never reclaim it (or can you?)! For this reason, you should always manage it wisely and monitoring (if not safe guarding[!]) it closely under the view of your goals and objectives.
A Legitimate Time Management Question: Time for What?
Time is a strategic resource in your life. One of the most basic lessons, I have learned, when I started my professional life, is to have goals and suitable tools for measuring your progress. Relating to the resource called, time, it is always legitimate to ask the question: “time for what“?
This is a tricky question and most of the times, trigger a batch of more relevant questions about, time:
- Why I (you/he/she) needs more time?
- What he/she would do with the extra time or the time he/she gained?
- How can you do more things in a certain period?
- How to gain more time, doing things you like and not things you dislike?
- How to make a better life-work balance?
- How to limit the time spent in non-productive activities?
- How to invest more time in the areas of our personal and professional life that promote our goals & dreams?
- How to automate the less interesting areas of our work, to focus on the important ones?
- How to prioritize, without feeling guilty of stealing time from someone else (our significant other, our family, our friends, etc.)
- How to lead a life without time frictions or bottlenecks?
- …
Well, the answer is not an easy one and certainly, there is no a single answer, time management system, method, technique, tool, or something else, that can effectively answer that need! But there are clues that can lead anyone to the desired direction.
How To Manage Your Time? Time Management At Its Best!
There are around, many approaches to time & effort management, all of which can be utilized by someone needs a better way of managing his or hers, time. Some of the most widely used include:
- The Getting Things Done System,
- The Autofocus Time Management System & Productivity Method,
- The Zen to Done method, and
- The Now Habit approach
to name only a few!
All these approaches can be used with great success, by somebody, who is willing to invest in such tools and aiming at managing more effectively his or her time! But for me, before you select any of these systems or the tools that support such approaches, you need to answer five (5) basic question, first. Namely:
- Are you ready to invest time in order to gain time? Before you gain some more time or create more margins in your everyday life you need, first, to invest resources and time in order to customize the system you are going to select to your specific requirements and living conditions. That, most of the times, is not easy and, of course, takes time!
- Your time management approach is compatible with your life plan and your life’s strategic resources? Since time is one of the most valuable resources is your life, you need to select an approach that is fitted to the general goals of your life. It does not make any sense to select an approach, that would not provide the intended results, isn’t it?
- Do you know how to use the extra time, you are going to gain? It is an important question, a one, cannot be answered frivolously! It needs focus thinking because the time gaining would always be a gain in strategic resources, needed for promoting our objectives in life. If you going to put yourself in trouble by adopting a time management system and invest time in tweaking it, customize it to your needs and enhance it, just for gaining some time in front of a TV, for instance, instead having quality time with your family, perhaps, the effort does not worth it!
- What is Time Management for YOU, and how you going to fit it in your daily activities? It is important to adopt and employ a time management approach that would fit smoothly into your life and daily activities! It would be totally counterproductive to use a system that you would spend more time for its maintenance rather than for its utility and the time it can gain you!
- How are you going to measure if your time management approach is effective or not? It is always important to have the right metrics in order to monitor your progress and the time you have gain in the process. Without the proper measurements, it would be impossible to evaluate the one system, against the other, and quite impossible to have a solid, logical, base for the adoption of one system against the other.
