Time Management Skills
Good time management skills is what
allows you to be productive and make progress in
different areas of your life, and still
retain control over your stress and
energy levels. Here is a discussion of
the most important time management activities
and skills to look at first.
Do you respect your priorities?
Prioritizing skills are among most wanted
time management skills for jobs that involve
handling many projects at the same time and
coping with information overload.
We all have many things to do. How do you
decide what to do first? A very common
answer is to start from what is
most urgent or from what feels most
comfortable. This is what you often do
automatically, if you don't learn to
prioritize.
The truth is that the most
important things are typically not urgent,
and the urgent things are often not that
important for your long-term success.
Without solid prioritizing skills you rarely
have time for what is most important, you
are getting stuck where you are.
Always prepared for unplanned
In
personal time management, ability to
prioritize your activities is also crucial
for your planning to work. You always face some
unexpected events or unpredictable delays
that leave less time to the planned
activities than you initially planned.
The more clear priorities you have each day,
the more prepared you are for such
unpredictable situations. Instead of being
totally kicked out of the planned way, you
simply sacrifice a few of lower
priority tasks, and you are still getting
most out of your time. You know that you are
prepared and you do your best.
Together with other time management skills,
ability to prioritize is not something we
are born with. Prioritizing and
time management skills
are learnt.
You hate planning?
Remember this wise quote,
"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."
This is more than true when
reaching ambitious long-term goals,
like starting and running
your own business
or writing a book.
Then whose goals do you really serve?
How serious
your planning is often determines how
much control you have over your life.
For example, the less planning you do for
your career and work, the more likely your
job will be only to strictly follow
someone's instructions.
Planning should be fun
I can tell you that planning can
be a pleasure. It should be, if
you want it to stay in your life.
You just need to find a planning style
that best suits your personality, and use
the right tools
.
Are you able to say no?
With all good intentions of people around
you, if they get a chance to put
their own problems on your shoulders, they
will do so.
Your ability to say no is an important
component of your time management skills.
It determines how much of your time will be
wasted on solving someone else's problems.
Problems that you are not supposed to and
even don't want to solve. That does not mean
you have to be too selfish. You just need to
see the line between helping people and simply
being used by them.
How easily you say no is a
matter of your personality rather than
knowledge of time management skills.
In contrast to a common
belief, ability to say no is not about being
more aggressive and mean. Instead, it is
about being assertive.
Assertiveness skills may be a problem for some people, but
fortunately, like time management skills,
those life skills can be learnt. I would recommend
to start from these
free assertiveness lessons
.
Important note
Here is just the right place to point
at an important condition for good
assertiveness and time management skills.
What I mean is your
self-confidence level.
Self-confidence development
is a little outside pure time management skills discussion.
Yet, you can hardly overestimate its
impact on your success in anything.
Overcoming procrastination: who, what, why, and what to do
Effective delegation skill we all need to use
Decision making skills and techniques
Recommended time management lessons: Time management skills From the Inside Out
Developing management skills
Time management skills workbook
Free goal achievement audiobook
Great time saving tip for webmasters
Personal time management guide main page
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