Creating A Powerful Time Management System

This is commonly known as the 80/20 rule. What Pareto's Principle states, in simple terms, is that 80% of our productive work comes from only 20% of our efforts. Put another way, we are operating inefficiently 80% of the time. In efficient action is a huge time water. While we are standing around with our "hands in our pockets" deciding what we should do next, time is quietly slipping away.

The solution is to know when we are most effective and take advantage of that time. Whether we are a morning person or a night own, we need to determine when we operate most efficiently and use that time to our advantage.

Also, it means that we need to develop a more efficient time management system. We need to implement the tools, tips and time management strategies that will allow us to get more done in less time.

Many very important projects continue to be put off indefinitely because they will take more time than we currently have available. So, we turn to other easier tasks with a higher sense of immediate payoff.

As a result, these projects never seem to get done, even where they may lead to a significant long term increase in our enjoyment of life.

The solution is to break these larger projects into smaller tasks. By doing so, it becomes easier to "eat the elephant one bite at a time."

Remember, if you break down the largest task into a series of thirty (30) smaller steps, you can complete just about any project in a month's time. Where that project will significantly and permanently change our lives, we need to complete it and reap the long term rewards in terms of increased productivity and quality of life.

Face it, we will get more out of completing a project like "remodeling the home office" than "getting the yard mowed" each week for the next four weeks, right?

If we take a spreadsheet and look at our day, we will find that it is divided into several chunks of time. Some chunks are flexible (like the time we have before we go to work).
Some are inflexible, like the standing sales meeting that we have from 10:00 am to 12 noon every Wednesday. If we plan out our schedule, we can identify those little hidden chunks of time that we can exploit. That is why I like to use time tracking software to find additional chunks of time throughout my day

Perhaps we can listen to a self-help audio book during our daily commute to work. Perhaps we could use our lunch hour to get by the home supply store and get the materials for the next project at home.

A well-crafted schedule will help you know what you should be doing at any given time. It allows you identify and exploit those chunks of down time that were previously wasted.

Lastly, it keeps others from invading your day and stealing your time away. It is easier to say "no" when you look at your time management planner and find an appointment for that time to be already made.

Every time management system incorporates a "to do" list. This allows us to see everything at a glance and prioritize our most important tasks.

Crating an effective to do list is really simple. Write everything down that you need to do and assign a 1,2 or 3 beside it.

1 = Today
2 = This Week
3 = This Month or Whenever

Sort and stack all of the most important tasks into a list and do those tasks first. Whenever, we are given a new project, we do not stopa dn do it. We prioritize it and place it on our list.
Henry Ford has a to do list with exactly three things on it at any given time. He would not do anything not on the list until he had finished all three things. Then, he would select three more things from his master list and do those tasks. Ford did not allow others to steal his time.
Neither should you.

While it is true that trying to do too many things at once can result in being a jack of all trades and master of none, effective time management requires that we learn to multitask. Multitasking might be as simple as bringing our laptop to a medical appointment and composing (but nor necessarily sending) some important emails. It might consist of running multiple errands while out for lunch.

The twin sister of learning to multitask is learning to delegate effectively.

If we need to go to the bank and our friend is already going, let him take our deposit to the bank as well. If we have the ability to delegate, but do not use it, we are failing to properly leverage the time at our disposal. True, the delegate may not do as good of a job as we would have done, but how good is good enough?