If you’re going to be successful in your life, you must learn about time management. No matter who you are or where you live today, both you and I have the same time a day, 24 hours. Even if you are the president, you’ll still have 24 hours, nothing more and nothing less.
A successful person has the same 24 hours a day, just that he manages it and make the most out of each minute. Therefore, if you want to accomplish more in your life, time management is a necessary skill.
Time is the only non-negotiable thing in our life. You can’t buy it or sell it, other people can’t give it to you. You can only learn how to manage your time well. So learn to organize your time. If you can manage your time and get more things done, what will happen to you? You’ll get more done.
Suppose you spend 2 hours a day to earn $100, what if you’re able to organize your time better and get more done within that 2 hours? What if you’re able to earn $200 after you’ve developed the time management skill? It is going to be a great help in your life. You’ll achieve what you want in your life faster.
So how do you develop time management skill? Very easy, just follow through these5 steps that I’m going to share with you below…
1. Create a daily planning system that works for you.
This is the first thing that you need to do. If you don’t have a list of to-do task, how are you going to know whether you’ve got your things done and how can you tell if you’ve done the most important task? So you must create a daily planning system that works for you.
For example, you can write all your to-do list on a piece of paper or you can use any computer software that you think will help you in this. You don’t need to spend hundreds to buy a time management device. As long as the system you created is easy to follow and suitable for you, it’ll do just fine.
I usually use a piece of paper. I’ll write down every single task that I need to get it done by the day on that paper, and then put it beside my computer so that I can see them and remind myself of getting them done.
2. Prioritize your task.
I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Many people are trying to achieve more in their life, but most of them spend time on the wrong things. They spend most of their time on less important task. If you want to be successful, this is the skill that you definitely need to apply in your life.
Most people spend 80% of their time to get 20% of the results. You need to do this the other way round. Spend 20% of your time and generate 80% of the results you desire. And you can achieve this by prioritizing your task and get more important task done first.
When you get more important task and result-producing task done, you definitely will create more results and accomplish much more in your life.
You may have heard of the story of Ivy Lee and Bethelehem Steel, but if not, it bears repeating. Ivy Lee was a management consultant who wanted a contract with the company. Schwab, the president of the company, rebuffed him, saying that they already knew more about producing steel than Lee would ever know. Then he gave Lee a challenge that would go down in business folklore. Schwab told Lee that the only thing he lacked was the time to implement all the ideas he had and that if Lee would show him a way to get more things done with his time, he would pay him any fee within reason.
According to the management expert Donald Schoeller, Lee replied, “Write down the most important tasks you have to do tomorrow and number them in order of importance. When you arrive in the morning, begin at once on number one and stay on it till it’s completed. Recheck your priorities; then begin with number two. If any task takes all day, never mind. Stick with it as long as it’s the most important one. If you don’t finish them all, you probably couldn’t do so with any other method,and without some system you’d probably not even decide which one was most important. Make this a habit every working day. When it works for you, give it to your men. Try it as long as you like. Then send me your check for what you think it’s worth.”
What he was saying is so unbelievably simple that you may find it hard to grasp its importance. Schwab loved it. He sent Lee a check for $25,000, calling the advice the most profitable lesson he’d ever learned.
This is how important prioritizing your tasks can be. So learn this now and apply it in your daily life to get more done. Here is a related post, Organizing Your Action Plan To Achieve Higher Success.
3. Focus in doing one thing at a time.
This is another important time management skill that you must use in your life. You’ve to break down your goals into smaller goals and to-do tasks, and then focus in doing just one of the task at a time. You can achieve much more by focusing in doing just one thing at a time.
Think about it, if you are to read an article, in the same time you try to chat with your friend, do you think you can fully sink the whole idea of that article into your mind? And do you think that you can get the task finish faster? Of course not, you’ll get distracted by all the instant messages and you may even spend time thinking of what to reply there. If you put in 100% of your focus into one task, you definitely will do it better and more effectively.
Do you know how can you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. This shows that as long as you stay focused in getting your tasks done, you’ll be able to get more done and even huge tasks that seem impossible. It is the same as building a house. It may seem like it is going to take forever to complete the house when you look at the workers start by clearing the site and getting it leveled.
However, as time pass by, you’ll then see the house being build up little by little. Time is a great factor to change, right? Rome was not built in a day and so with the successful life that you desire. It is not likely that you’ll make $1 million in just one day, but it is possible for you to achieve this within 3 years or so.
Read this post to learn more about focusing in what you do, How To Focus Yourself Toward Success.
These are the 3 essential steps how you can practice good time management in your life. So develop this habit now.
