So life is busy. You are committed to personal growth and business management. You feel that you have taken lots of steps to success. You are developing your leaderships skills and working on a positive mind-set. When you look around you are proud of your work relationships and the effective communication you have with your team. You have healthy relationships in your private life and things are looking good. Except….some days you feel totally overwhelmed and stressed out. Your schedule is crazy. This is exactly when you need to consider the importance of time management and just which time management tools you can use to keep you focused on success.
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A great way to manage your time better is to embed four time management tools into your daily habits. These tools will help you to keep track of your tasks, your time, the people in your life and the information you are dealing with.
The key time management tool that underpins the other three is Use A Planner. It is tough to manage your time if you have no idea how and where you are spending it. A great calendar will enable you to track, plan and schedule your time and you will be able to do this daily, weekly, monthly and, most importantly for productivity, hourly. You can use Google Calendar, iCal or Outlook. As well as the calendar on your smartphone, there are all sorts of apps available for Android and iOS. If you prefer the written word, use a daily diary. What is most ideal is a combination of these so that you can access your calendar at any time. A great time management technique is to schedule more than your meetings. To get the greatest benefit you must schedule your daily tasks, any projects you are working on and, really importantly, time to think and to plan. Using a planner will also allow you to plan your downtime and the time you take for yourself.
Writing a Daily ToDo List is a very powerful time management tool which will lead to increased productivity by keeping you focused and on track. You may feel as though you can remember everything and resist writing it down however this is likely to result in you being constantly distracted by ringing phones, interruptions, unexpected problems and e-mails. To create your daily list, write down every single task that you intend to complete over the course of the day. Make sure that a corresponding amount of time to complete these has been scheduled into your calendar. Most people are surprised to realise that you will increase your productivity by 25 percent from the very first day you start using your ToDo list – this is an extra two hours of productive time in every eight hour working day. WOW!! Writing this list will bring order to your overwhelm faster than any other time management tool. Of course, once you have written up your list, you will need to action it and as a result of taking action new tasks and responsibilities will come up. You will need to return phone calls and reply to emails and talk to people. Write every one of these additional tasks down so that you are actively building the habit of keeping a ToDo list.
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Your next time management tool is to Organise your list by Priority. Once your ToDo list is written up, review each of the tasks and prioritize them into what is most important. Something to remember here is that the 80/20 Rule, also knows as the Pareto Principle, says that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts. This means that the key to being really efficient is the prioritization of tasks that contribute the most to what you want to achieve. Another great tool the drives prioritization is The Eisenhower Matrix which is also referred to as Urgent-Important Matrix. This helps you to decide on and prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and important tasks which you should either delegate or not do at all.
The things that sit in the urgent and important quadrant get done first, that day. The important but not so urgent things sit in the second quadrant. As these contribute to your long-term targets, they should be scheduled and happen regularly. The things that are urgent but less important can be either delegated to someone else or outsourced or scheduled for you to do as a lower priority. The final quadrant of the matrix is the things that are neither urgent or important which means that they are things that you don’t need to do at all. Your goal should be to work out of the scheduling quadrant as much as possible. Remember you are finishing tasks and not just collecting them into a list so stay focused on prioritizing to your needs, including both business and private life tasks, and enjoy the feeling of having kicked some goals and completed the tasks.
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The final time management tool I use at every single appointment is Writing in a Notebook. This is so much better than a pad or bits of paper or post-it notes which can and will get lost. You need one place to keep all of your notes and one place to go looking when you need to find a piece of information. Your notebook can be used to record information from face to face meetings, individual and group meetings and telephone discussions. To make it easy to retrieve information, name and date each entry, making a note of who was present. Keep a track on your notebooks by writing the start and finish dates on the front cover once you have filled them. Store them somewhere safe, all together. One approach to writing in a notebook is to use the right-hand side of the book for taking notes only and the left-hand side for listing actions that come from the discussion such as ***send copy of document to client. This allows you to easily see the specific tasks that need to be completed following the discussion and to put them into your ToDo list without having to read through many pages of your notes.
Following these 4 time management tools will minimize your feelings of being overwhelmed and will lift your productivity in all areas of your life. Sort out which planner or calendar suits you best and be deliberate about using it each day as you manage and prioritise your ToDo list referring to your notebook for any relevant information. As a result of implementing these tools your crazy schedule will settle down and your excitement and passion for your life and your business will skyrocket.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post on Using These 4 Time Management Tools Skyrocketed My Passion For My Life & My Business. Remember to leave a comment below and subscribe to my YouTube channel to receive the latest life and business tips straight to your inbox!