There are four time management tools and techniques that you should practice to increase productivity and master personal organizational skills. Each of them takes a little time to learn and master, but pays you back in greater efficiency and effectiveness for the rest of your life.

Time Management Tool #1: Use a Time Planner

The first time management technique that you can use is a time planning system that contains everything you need to plan your life and improve your organizational skills. A good time planner will contain a master list where you can capture every task, goal, and required action as it comes up. This master list then becomes the core of your time-planning system to increase productivity throughout your life. From this master list, you allocate individual tasks to various months, weeks, and days.

The second part of the time-planning system is a calendar that enables you to improve your organizational skills by planning several months ahead. With the right system, you will be able to transfer individual items from your master list to the exact day when you intend to complete them.

The next part of your system is a daily list. This daily list is perhaps the single most important planning tool you can have. Some people call it a ‘‘to-do list.’’

Time Management Tool #2: Increase Productivity by Working from a List

Every effective executive works from a daily list. It is the most powerful time management technique ever discovered to increase productivity and improve your organizational skills. Ineffective executives, those who are overwhelmed with too many things to do and too little time, either do not use a list or do not refer to a list if they have one in the first place. They often resist the idea of writing everything down. As a result, they find themselves continually distracted by ringing phones, interruptions, unexpected emergencies, and e-mail requests.

When you create your daily list, you begin by writing down every single task that you intend to complete over the course of the day. The rule is that you will increase productivity by 25 percent the very first day that you start using a list. This means that you will get two extra hours of productive time in an eight hour day from the simple act of making a list of everything you have to do before you start work. You can bring order out of chaos faster with a list than with any other time management tool.

Once you have written up your daily lists and begun work, new tasks and responsibilities will come up. Telephone calls will have to be returned. Correspondence will have to be dealt with.

In every case, write it down on the list before you do it.

Sometimes a task or demand on your time will seem urgent when it comes up. But something that might distract you from your other work regains its true importance when you write it down. An item that is written down on the list next to all your other tasks and responsibilities often doesn’t seem so important after all.

Time Management Tool #3: Organize Your List by Priority

Once you have a list for your day’s activities, the next step is for you to organize this list in order of priority. Once your list is organized, it becomes a map to guide you from morning to evening in the most effective way to help you increase productivity. This time management guide tells you what you have to do and what is more or less important. You will soon develop the habit of using your list as a blueprint for the day and improve your organizational skills along the way. Refuse to do anything until you have written it down on the list and organized it relative to its value in comparison to the other things you have to do.

Time Management Tool #4: Improve Your Organizational Skills with a 45-File System

There is a simple method of organizing your time and your schedule for up to two years in advance. It is called the ‘‘45-file system.’’ This is a tickler file that lets you plan and organize your activities and callbacks for the next twenty-four months.

First, you get a box of forty-five files with fourteen hanging files to put them in. The forty-five files are divided as follows:

There are thirty-one files numbered one through thirty-one for the days of the month. There are twelve files for the months of the year, January through December. The last two files are for

the next two years. This is a wonderful time management system that you can also use with hanging files in your desk drawer.

When you have an appointment or responsibility for six months from now, you simply drop it into that monthly file. At the beginning of each month, you take out all of your responsibilities for that month and sort them into your daily files, numbered one through thirty-one. Each day, you take out the file for that day and that becomes the starting point of your planning.

This time management system takes a few minutes to set up. It then assures that you constantly improve your organizational skills and never miss or forget to follow up on a distant call, task, or appointment.

Thank you for reading this article on improving your organizational skills with effective time management tools to help you increase productivity throughout your life.

Time management behaviors are very much a matter of choice and what lies within your subconscious mind. You choose to be efficient or you choose to be disorganized. Effective people choose to focus and concentrate on their highest-value tasks that contribute the most value to their life.

The starting point of overcoming your previous programming and eliminating the mental blocks to time management is for you to make a clear, unequivocal decision to become one of the most effective people you know. You must decide, right here and now, that you are going to become an expert in time management. Your aim should be to manage your time so well that people look up to you and use you as a role model for their own work habits.

Program Your Subconscious Mind

There are several mental techniques that effective people use to program their subconscious mind for peak performance.

1. Use Positive Self-Talk

The first method that effective people use for programming their subconscious mind is positive self-talk, or the use of positive affirmations. Highly effective people use these commands that pass from their conscious mind to their subconscious mind. Affirmations are statements that you either say out loud or say to yourself with the emotion and enthusiasm that drives the words into your subconscious mind as new operating instructions. Here are some examples of affirmative commands that you can use to improve your time management skills.

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Begin by repeating over and over to yourself, ‘‘I am excellent at time management! I am excellent at time management!’’ Any command repeated again and again in a spirit of faith, acceptance, and belief will eventually be accepted by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind will then organize your words, actions, and feelings to be consistent with these new commands.

You can continually repeat, ‘‘I am always punctual for my appointments! I am always punctual for my appointments!’’ You can create your own mental commands, such as ‘‘I am well organized!’’ or ‘‘I concentrate easily on my highest payoff tasks!’’ My favorite time management affirmation is to repeat continually, ‘‘I use my time well. I use my time well. I use my time well.’’ Used consistently, positive affirmations will start to influence your external behaviors.

2. Visualize Yourself as Highly Efficient

The second technique that you can use to program your subconscious mind is visualization. Your subconscious mind is most immediately influenced by mental pictures. In self-image psychology, the person you see is the person you will be. Begin to see yourself as one of the most highly effective people you know. Recall and recreate memories and pictures of yourself when you were performing at your best. Think of a time when you were working efficiently and effectively and getting through an enormous amount of work. Play this picture of yourself over and over again on the screen of your mind.

In athletic training, this is called ‘‘mental rehearsal.’’ This requires practicing and rehearsing actions in your mind before you actually engage in the physical activity. The more relaxed you are when you visualize yourself performing at your best, the more rapidly this command is accepted by your subconscious mind and becomes a part of your thinking and behavior later on.

The method is simple. First, sit or lie in a quiet place where you can be completely alone in the silence. Then imagine yourself going through an important upcoming experience, such as a meeting, a presentation, a negotiation, or even a date. As you sit or lie completely relaxed, create a picture of the coming event and see it unfolding perfectly in every respect. See yourself as calm, positive, happy, and in complete control. See the other people doing and saying exactly what you would want them to do if the situation was perfect. Then, breathe deeply, relax, and just let it go, as if you had sent off an order and the delivery is guaranteed, exactly as you pictured it. The best time to practice mental rehearsal is at night in bed, just before you fall asleep. The last thing you should do before you doze off is to imagine yourself performing at your best the following day. You will be amazed at how often the upcoming event or experience happens exactly as you visualized it.

In becoming excellent at time management, it’s important to practice mental rehearsal by continually seeing yourself as you would be if you were one of the best-organized and most effective people you could imagine. Eventually these pictures will ‘‘lock in.’’ When they do, you will find yourself easily and automatically using your time efficiently in everything you do.

3. Act the Part

The third mental technique you can use to program your subconscious mind for efficiency and effectiveness is to act the part of a highly effective person. Imagine that you have been selected for a role in a movie or stage play. In this role, you are to act the part of a person who is extremely well organized in every respect.

As you go through your daily life, imagine you are an actor who is playing this part, who is already very good at time management. Act as if you are already using your time efficiently and well.

Pretend that you are an expert in personal efficiency. Fake it until you make it. When you pretend that you are an excellent time manager, eventually your actions, which are under your direct control, will foster a mind-set, or the belief in your subconscious mind, that is consistent with it.

4. Benchmark Against the Best

The fourth mental technique you can use for becoming a highly effective person is called ‘‘modeling.’’ Modeling requires you to pattern yourself after someone you know who uses his time well.

Think of someone you admire for good time management skills. Use that person as your standard or your model. Imagine what he would do in any given situation, and then do it yourself.

Many of the most effective people in America reached their positions by modeling themselves in their earlier years after someone who was already extremely effective, someone they admired and respected for qualities they wanted to develop in themselves.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article on the four mental techniques that effective people use to program their subconscious mind! What other time management mental techniques do you use? Please share and comment below!

Everyone wants more free time to do the things they love. It can take hard effort to get things done and save time when our schedules are packed with things to do. But first, in order to save time, it’s important to examine how we spend our time.

What Happened to Our Free Time?

According to time management specialist Michael Fortino, over an average lifetime, you will spend seven years in the bathroom. You will spend six years eating. You will spend five years waiting in lines. You will spend four years cleaning your house. You will spend three years in meetings. You will spend one year searching for things. You will spend eight months opening junk mail. You will spend six months sitting at red lights. You will spend 120 days brushing your teeth. And here’s the big surprise: You will spend four minutes per day conversing with your spouse and thirty seconds per day conversing with your children.

FREE TIME MANAGEMENT REPORT: Get it here!

Here are five ideas that you can use in your personal life to get things done more efficiently and save time:

1.  Save Time by Shopping All At Once

When you go shopping, do it all at once. Don’t shop at one store one day, and another store on a different day. Go out and do all of your shopping on a single day in a single trip. By the way, the very best time to shop for groceries is Tuesday afternoon and evenings. Why? Store shelves are restocked on Monday after the weekend. By shopping on Tuesday, you can get in, get the greatest selection, get out fast, and get more free time.

2.  Save Time by Bunching Your Errands

When you have several errands to do, bunch them and do them all at once, rather than doing one today, one tomorrow, and so on through the week. If you get things done all at once, you will significantly increase the amount of free time you have to do the things you really want to do.

3.  Don’t Waste the Time of Others

Ask yourself, ‘‘What do I do that wastes the time of others?’’ Wasting the time of other people is usually not deliberate. It comes from not thinking about how valuable their time is. We often waste the time of others through lack of consideration.

If you are a boss or manager with people reporting to you, avoid the tendency to waste the time of your staff by keeping them waiting or being late for meetings. The more respect you show for the time of your staff, the more valuable and important they will feel. The same applies in your personal life. Show the same respect in the same way with your family and friends.

Ask yourself, ‘‘How do I waste the time of my boss? My coworkers? My subordinates? My spouse? My children? And others?’’ And then make efforts to avoid doing it. If you are curious, go and ask people. Say, ‘‘What do I do that wastes your time? How could I change the way I use my time so that it would be more efficient for you?’’ Don’t be surprised by what they tell you. By asking these questions, you’ll be able to save time for both parties.

4.  Get More Free Time by Being Punctual

Only 2 percent of people are punctual all the time, and these people are recognized and respected by everyone. Punctuality is professional and courteous. Make a habit of being on time. Remember if you’re not early, you’re late. There is no such thing as being fashionably late. It is really just being inconsiderate and disorganized.

5.  Get Things Done Quickly

Get things done by developing a fast tempo and picking up the pace. Remember, fast tempo is essential to success. Move quickly in cleaning up your house, putting things away, getting ready to go out—in all possible household tasks and responsibilities. The more things you do, and the faster you work to get them done, the more energy you have and the more you save time.

The faster you work and the more you get done, the better you feel. Most successful people work at a higher tempo of activity than unsuccessful people. They don’t necessarily do different things, but they get things done more efficiently in a given time than the average person. They produce more in less time, and as a result, they get paid more and promoted faster. Fast tempo is essential to success.

The best advice is to always focus on your ability to save time. Continually look for ways to save time by cutting down or eliminating the major time wasters from your life at work or home. Only then will you have enough time to work on the goals that are central to your success and happiness. Only then can you become an excellent time manager.

What do you do to save time and get things done more efficiently? Please share your tips and comment below!

If everyone agrees that excellent time management is one of the most desirable personal skills, why is it that so few people can be described as ‘‘well organized or efficient’’?

I have found that many people have mental barriers and hold ideas about time management that aren’t true. But if you believe something to be true, it becomes true for you. Your beliefs cause you to see yourself and the world, and your relationship to time management, in a particular way.

If you have negative beliefs in any area, these beliefs will affect your thinking and actions, and will eventually become your reality. You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.

Mental Barrier 1: Worries about Decreasing Your Naturalness and Spontaneity

One of the mental barriers, or negative beliefs, of time management is that if you are too well organized, you become cold, calculating, and unemotional. Some people feel that they will lose their spontaneity and freedom if they are extremely effective and efficient.

They will become unable to ‘‘go with the flow,’’ to express themselves openly and honestly. People think that managing your time well makes you too rigid and inflexible.

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This turns out not to be true at all. Many people hide behind this false idea and use it as an excuse for not disciplining themselves the way they know they should. The fact is that people who are disorganized are not spontaneous; they are merely confused, and often frantic. Often they suffer a good deal of stress.

It turns out that the better organized you are, the more time and opportunity you have to be truly relaxed, truly spontaneous, and truly happy. You have a much greater internal locus of control.

The key is structuring and organizing everything that you possibly can: Thinking ahead; planning for contingencies; preparing thoroughly; and focusing on specific results. Only then can you be completely relaxed and spontaneous when the situation changes. The better organized you are in the factors that are under your control, the greater freedom and flexibility you have to quickly make changes whenever they are necessary.

Mental Barrier 2: Negative Mental Programming

Another one of the mental barriers that hinder the development of excellent time management skills is negative programming, which is often picked up from your parents, but also from other influential people as you are growing up. If your parents or others told you that you were a messy person, or that you were always late, or that you never finished anything you started, chances are that as an adult, you may still be operating unconsciously to obey these earlier commands.

The most common excuse used for this type of behavior is: ‘‘That’s just the way I am,’’ or ‘‘I have always been that way.’’

The fact is that no one is born messy and disorganized, or neat and efficient. Time management skills are disciplines that we learn and develop with practice and repetition. If we have developed bad time management habits, we can unlearn them. We can replace them with good habits over time.

Mental Barrier 3: Self-Limiting Beliefs

The last of the mental barriers to good time management skills is a negative self-concept, or what are called ‘‘self-limiting beliefs.’’

Many people believe that they don’t have the ability to develop good time management skills. Their mental barriers force them to believe that it is an inborn part of their background or heritage. But there is no gene or chromosome for poor time management skills, or good time management skills, for that matter. Nobody is born with a genetic deficiency in personal organization. Your personal skills and behaviors are very much under your own control.

Motivating Yourself to Time Management Success

Here is an example to prove that most of what you do is determined by your level of motivation and desire in that area.

Imagine that someone were to offer you a million dollars to manage your time superbly for the next thirty days. Imagine that an efficiency expert was going to follow you around with a clipboard and a video camera for one month. After thirty days, if you had used your time efficiently and well, working on your highest priorities all day, every day, you would receive a prize of one million dollars. How efficient would you be over the next thirty days?

The fact is that, with sufficient motivation (one million dollars!), you would be one of the most efficient, effective, best organized, and focused people in the world. The best news is

that after one full month of practicing the very best time management skills you know, you would have developed habits of high productivity and top performance that would last you the rest of your life.

Thank you for reading this post on developing excellent time management skills by overcoming mental barriers. Please share this article with others and comment below!

The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something while maintaining the ability to stay focused on the long term goal. The potential consequences of any task or activity are the key determinants of how important it really is to you and to your company. This way of evaluating the significance of a task is how you determine what your next priority really is.

Stop Procrastinating and Stay Focused

This law says that, “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”

When you run out of time and the consequences for non-completion of a key task or project can be really serious, you always seem to find the time to get it done, often at the very last minute. When you have no choice, when the consequences for non-completion are serious enough, you start early, you stay focused and you drive yourself to complete the job rather than to face the unpleasantness that would follow if you didn’t get it completed within the time limit.

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Rule: “There will never be enough time to do everything you have to do.”

It has been estimated that the average person in business today, especially managers in the age of cutbacks, is working at 110% to 130% of capacity. And the jobs and responsibilities just keep piling up. Everyone has stacks of reading material they still have to go through. One study concluded recently that the average executive has 300-400 hours of reading and projects backlogged at home and at the office.

What this means is that you will never be caught up and planning skills are more crucial than ever.. All you can hope for is to stay focused and be on top of your most important responsibilities. The others will just have to wait.

Deadlines Are an Excuse

Many people say that they work better under the pressure of deadlines. Unfortunately, years of research indicate that this is seldom true.

It is much better to better your planning skills, and then build in a sizable buffer to compensate for unexpected delays and diversions. However much time you think a task will take, add on another 20% or more, or make a game of getting in done well in advance of the deadline. You will be amazed at how much more relaxed you are, and how much better a job you do when you stop procrastinating.

Increase Your Planning Skills

There are three questions that you can use on a regular basis to help you stay focused on getting your most important tasks completed on schedule. The first question is “What are my highest value activities?”

This is one of the most important questions you can ask and answer. What are your highest value activities? First, think this through for yourself. Then, ask your boss. Ask your coworkers and subordinates. Ask your friends and family. Like focusing the lens of a camera, you must be crystal clear about your highest value activities before you begin work.

The second question you can ask continually is, “What can I and only I do, that if done well, will make a real difference?”

This question comes from Peter Drucker, the management guru. It is one of the best of all questions for achieving personal effectiveness. What can you, and only you do, that if done well, can make a real difference?

Every hour of every day, you can ask yourself this question and there will be a specific answer. Your job is to use planning skills to be clear about the answer and then to start and work on this task before anything else.

The third question you can ask is “What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?”

This is the core question of time management. Answering this question correctly is the key to stop procrastinating and developing better planning skills. Every hour of every day, there is some task that is the most valuable use of your time at that moment. Your job is to ask yourself this question, over and over again, and to always be working on the answer to it, whatever it is.

Do first things first and second things not at all. As Goethe said, “The things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.”

The more accurate your answers to these questions, the easier it will be for you to set clear priorities, to stop procrastinating and to get started on that one activity that represents the most valuable use of your time.

Thank you for reading this post on how to stay focused and stop procrastinating. Please share this article with others and comment below!

When you hit a crunch point, your ability to stay focused and concentrate can make all the difference between success and failure. You cannot do everything, so an effective way for you to complete your most important tasks is to make a list. Effective time management is essential to getting through your busy schedule.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, ‘‘The things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.’’ Stephen Covey said, ‘‘The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing.’’ There is a rule that says that every minute spent in planning saves ten minutes in execution. Make a list before you start to ensure that when you do begin work, you will stay focused on that activity that can have the greatest possible consequences for yourself and your business.

Refuse to ‘‘major in minors.’’ Keep asking yourself, ‘‘What’s really important here?’’ Your ability to ask and answer this question will keep you on track and stay focused throughout the day.

Think on Paper

To stay focused on your top priorities, there are a series of steps you can take for effective time management. First of all, think on paper. Writing things down is absolutely essential for you to be able to take control of the situation during the emergency or crisis. Before you take any action, make a list of everything that you have to do to solve the problem and get through the crunch.

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In 1342 a.d., the philosopher William of Occam developed a concept that has come to be known as Occam’s Razor. This principle says that, in dealing with any problem or complex issue, the simplest and most direct explanation or solution is usually the correct one. What this means is that you should refuse to allow yourself to become overwhelmed with trivia and detail. Stay focused and start off by trying the simplest possible solution.

Make a List

At the beginning of your day, make a list of everything that you have to do during that day. Go over the list and number the top seven items. Ask yourself, ‘‘If I could do only one thing on this list today, which one task would it be?’’ Put a ‘‘1’’ next to that task or activity. Repeat this exercise until you have your major tasks organized from one to seven to help you stay focused throughout your day.

Then, discipline yourself to start immediately on your number one task and to work at it with single-minded concentration until it is complete. Refuse to do anything else but that one thing. If you are called away or distracted, immediately return to that task, like a gyroscope returns to center, and begin working on it again. Invariably, this one task can have the greatest potential consequences in your job or situation.

Practice Triage and Stay Focused

For effective time management, use the triage method. This method was developed by the French army in World War I, when the dressing stations behind the lines were swamped with far too many wounded soldiers for the doctors and nurses to treat. They solved the problem by dividing the wounded into three groups. The first were those who would die, no matter how much treatment they received. They were put aside and made comfortable.

The second group included those who had only light wounds. They would survive whether they got immediate treatment or not. They also were put aside. The third group consisted of those soldiers who would survive only if they were treated immediately. This is where the doctors and nurses focused their attention.

In your business you should apply triage as well. Stay focused on the problems that can be solved if you act immediately. Refuse to worry about situations that cannot be resolved. Let them go. And don’t waste time on situations that will take care of themselves whether you do anything or not. Stay focused on the problems, decisions, and activities where immediate action is essential to saving the situation.

Develop Effective Time Management Skills to Stay on Track

During crunch time, keep asking yourself key questions: What is really important in this situation? Of all the things I could do, if I could do only one thing, what would it be? What does this situation need of me that only I can contribute?

Here are the two best questions to keep you on track. The first is, ‘‘What can I, and only I, do that if done well, will make a real difference?’’ The second question, which you must ask and answer over and over again, is: ‘‘What is the most valuable use of my time right now?’’

Whatever your answers to these questions, discipline yourself to work on that priority, and only that, until it is complete. When you stay focused and concentrate on your highest priorities, you become more productive and effective in helping yourself and your company out of the crisis.

Thank you for reading this post about effective time management and how to stay focused. Please share this article with others and comment below!

There are seven ways to increase productivity, performance and output, by developing a clear vision and increasing your learning curve.

Work Longer Hours

First, work longer hours. Start a little earlier, work through lunchtime and stay a little later. By starting your day earlier than the average person, you beat the traffic into work. By staying a little later, you leave after the traffic. By doing both, you can add two or three hours to your productive working day without really affecting your lifestyle. These extra hours are all you need to become one of the most productive and highest paid people in your field.

Work Harder to Increase Productivity

Second, work harder at what you do. When you work, work all the time you work. Don’t waste time. Don’t look upon the workplace as an extension of school or university where you spend most of your time socializing with your friends. Instead, when you come into work, put your head down and work full blast for the entire day. This practice alone will enable you to increase productivity.

Work Faster with a Clear Vision

Third, work faster. Develop a sense of urgency. Get on with the job. Don’t waste time. Develop and maintain a clear vision and a fast tempo in your work activities. Deliberately move faster from task to task. You’ll be amazed at how much more you’ll get done just by deciding to pick up the pace in everything you do.

Chose High Value Projects

Fourth, work on higher value activities. Remember that it is not the number of hours you work that matters. Rather, it is the value of the tasks that you complete that counts. It is the quality and quantity of results that you achieve. The more time you spend on higher value tasks, the greater results you will obtain from every hour you put in.

Showcase Your Strengths

Fifth, do things you are better at. When you work on tasks where you are especially skilled and experienced, you can accomplish much more in a shorter period of time than could an inexperienced person. In addition, work at getting better at the most important things you do. There is nothing that will increase the quality and quantity of your output faster than for you to become absolutely excellent at performing the most important tasks that are expected of you.

Develop Your Learning Curve

Sixth, bunch your tasks. Do several similar activities all at the same time. By writing all your letters, filling out all your expense reports, or preparing all your proposals at the same time, you get better and faster with each task. You get onto what is called the “learning curve.” Each subsequent task takes you less time. You can actually reduce the amount of time it takes to perform a particular task by 80% by doing several similar tasks one after the other.

Simplify Your Work

The seventh key to productivity improvement is for you to simplify your work with a clear vision of what is important so that it is easier to do. Consolidate several parts of the job into a single task so that there are fewer steps to increase productivity. Eliminate lower value activities altogether.

The Race is On

Compete against yourself to see how much you can get done of high value each day. Make it a game. Set schedules and deadlines for yourself and race against the deadlines. See if you can get more and more done in less time and improve your learning curve.

Develop a clear vision for yourself as a highly productive person. Think about the times in your life when you were most productive, effective and efficient. Think about those situations when you were doing the right things and you were doing them in the right way. You were getting a lot done in a short period of time. You felt terrific about yourself and your performance. You were in that magical state of “flow,” when you felt happy and exhilarated.

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Project forward five years and imagine that you are now one of the most productive people in your field. What would you look like? How would you be working? What would you be working on? What would be your guiding principles for personal performance? How would people describe you to others in terms of the way you work? Let your future vision guide your present performance.

Thank you for reading this post on how to increase productivity with a clear vision and strong learning curve. Please share this article with others and comment below!

Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is “time poverty.”  Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal lives.  Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they feel.  Instead of clearly deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around you.  Pretty soon you lose all sense of control.

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Time is your most precious resource.  It is the most valuable thing you have.  It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved.  It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value.  All work requires time.  The very act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to improve your personal time management and increase productivity immediately. I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a calculator or a cellular telephone.  It was something that you used to  increase productivity and eventually be paid more money.  Then I learned that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill.  It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.

Increase Productivity through Personal Goals

In your work or business life, there are so many demands on your time from other people that very little of your time is yours to use as you choose.  However, at home you can exert a tremendous amount of control over how you use your time and increase productivity throughout the day in your personal life. Personal time management begins with you.  It begins with your thinking through what is really important to you in life.  You need to set goals in three major areas of your life.  First, you need family and personal goals.  These are the reasons why you get up in the morning, why you work hard and upgrade your skills, why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your time. What are your family and personal goals, both tangible and intangible? A tangible family goal could be a bigger house, a better car, a larger television set, a vacation, or anything else that costs money.  An intangible goal would be to build a higher quality relationship with your spouse and children, to spend more time with your family going for walks or reading books.  Achieving these family and personal goals are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.

Make Clear Business and Career Goals

The second area of goals are your business and career goals.  These are the “how” goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, “why” goals.  How can you achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals? How can you develop the skills and abilities to stay ahead of the curve in your career? Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when balanced with family and personal goals.

Personal Development Goals

The third type of goals are your personal development goals. Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you want to build your life.  Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve. But in order to do it, you must go to work on yourself and never stop.

3 Key Time Management Actions

A principle of time management says that hard time pushes out soft time.  This means that hard time, such as working, will push out soft time, such as the time you spend with your family.  If you don’t get your work done at the office because you don’t use your time well, you almost invariably have to rob that time from your family.  As a result, because your family is important to you, you find yourself in a values conflict. There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually to keep your personal life in balance.  The first question is, “What is really important to me?”  Whenever you find yourself with too much to do and too little time, stop and ask yourself, “What is it that is really important for me to do in this situation?”  Then, make sure that what you are doing is the answer to that question. The second question is, “What are my highest value activities?”  In your personal life, this means, “What are the things that I do that give me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction?  Of all the things that I could be doing at any one time, what are the things that I could do to add the greatest value to my life?” And the final question for you to ask over and over again is, “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”  Since you can only do one thing at a time, you must constantly organize you life so that you are doing one thing, the most important thing, at every moment.

Set Personal Priorities

Personal time management enables you to choose what to do first, what to do second, and what not to do at all.  It enables you to organize every aspect of your life so that you can get the greatest joy, happiness, and satisfaction out of everything you do. Thank you for reading this article on time management and increasing productivity. Please share and comment below!

This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more possibilities and opportunities for you to become action oriented and achieve more of your goals than ever. In fact, there are so many good things that you can do that your time management skills and ability to decide among them maybe the critical determinant of what you accomplish in life.

If you are like most people today, you are overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. As you struggle to get caught up, new tasks and responsibilities just keep rolling in, like the waves of the ocean. Because of this, you will never be able to do everything you have to do. You will never be caught up. You will always be behind in some of your tasks and responsibilities, and probably in many of them.

The Need to Be Selective

Time management is essential to developing good habits for success. Your ability to select your most important task at each moment, get started on that task and to get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill you can develop.

An average person who develops the habit of being action oriented and  getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but who gets very little done.

Develop Good Habits of Success and Become Action Oriented

Your success in life and work will be determined by the kinds of habits that you develop over time. The habit of setting priorities, overcoming procrastination, being action oriented and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill. As such, this habit is learnable through practice and repetition, over and over again, until it locks into your subconscious mind and becomes a permanent part of your behavior. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes both automatic and easy to do.

Through time management the habit of and starting and completing important tasks has immediate and continuous payoff. You are designed mentally and emotionally in such a way that task completion gives you a positive feeling. It makes you happy. It makes you feel like a winner.

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Whenever you complete a task, of any size or importance, you feel a surge of energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem. The more important the completed task, the happier, more confident and powerful you feel about yourself and your world.

Important task completion triggers the release of endorphins in your brain. These endorphins give you a natural “high.” The endorphin rush that follows successful completion of any task makes you feel more positive, personable, creative and confident.

The Three D’s of New Habit Formation and Time Management

You need three key qualities to develop good habits of focus and concentration. They are all learnable. They are decision, discipline, and determination.

First, make a decision to develop the habit of becoming action oriented. Second, discipline yourself to practice the principles you are about to learn over and over until they become automatic. And third, back everything you do with determination until the habit is locked in and becomes a permanent part of your personality.

Visualize Yourself As You Want to Be

There is a special way that you can accelerate your progress toward becoming the highly productive, effective, action oriented, efficient person that you want to be. It consists of your thinking continually about the rewards and benefits of being an action oriented, fast moving, and focused person. See yourself as the kind of person who gets important jobs done quickly and well on a consistent basis through effective time management.

Your mental picture of yourself has a powerful effect on your behavior. Visualize yourself as the person you intend to be in the future. Your self-image, the way you see yourself on the inside, largely determines your performance on the outside. All improvement in your outer life begins with improvements in your mental pictures, on the inside.

You have a virtually unlimited ability to learn and develop new skills, habits and abilities. When you train yourself, through repetition and practice, to overcome procrastination and get your most important tasks completed quickly, you will move yourself onto the fast track in your life and career and step on the accelerator.

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The Law of Correspondence says that your outer life tends to be a mirror image of your inner life. Everywhere you look, there you are. Everywhere you look, you see yourself reflected back. You do not see the world as it is, but as you are—inside. If you want to change what is going on in the world around you—your relationships, results, and rewards—you have to take control and change what is going on in the world inside you. Fortunately, this is the only part of your life over which you have complete control.

The Starting Point of Success

The starting point of excelling in time management is desire. Almost everyone feels that their time management skills could be vastly better than they are. The key to motivation is “motive.” For you to develop sufficient desire to develop Time Power, you must be intensely motivated by the benefits you feel you will enjoy.

Gaining Two Extra Hours Each Day

Your productivity can dramatically change if you add to extra hours to your day. Two extra hours per day, multiplies by five days per week, equals ten extra hours a week. Ten extra hours a week multiplied by fifty weeks a year would give you 500 extra productive hours each year. And 500 hours translates into more that twelve, forty-hour weeks, or the equivalent of three extra months of productive working time each year. By gaining two productive hours each day, you can take control and transform your personal and working life.

Improving Your Productivity Performance

Your productivity, performance, and income will increase by at least 25 percent over the next year. Two more productive hours, out of the eight hours that you spend at work each day, is the equivalent of at least a 25 percent increase.

Increasing Your Sense of Control

When you leverage the power of time, you will have a greater sense of control over your work and your personal life. You will feel like the master of your own destiny, and a power in your own life. You will feel more positive and powerful in every part of your life.

Take Control of your Time and Your Life

The starting point to time management is developing a stronger internal focus. The more skilled you become at managing your time, the happier and more confident you will feel. You will have a stronger sense of personal power. You will feel in charge of your own destiny. You will have a greater sense of well-being. You will be more positive and personable.

Having More Time for Your Family

When you take control of your life you will have more time for your family and your personal life as you get your time under control. You will have more time for your friends, for relaxation, for personal and professional development, and for anything else you want to do. When you become a master of your own time, and recapture two hours per day, you can use that extra time to chase your dreams.

Take Action Now

Figure out how you can add two hours of productivity to your day. Make a schedule of your day and find where you can squeeze two hours of time out for maximum efficiency.

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Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.” (Nido Qubein)

Your ability to think, plan, decide and take action determines the entire course of your life. The better you become in each area, the better will be each part of your life and the faster you will achieve your goals.

Personal strategic planning is the tool you use to get from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. The difference between a person who uses personal strategic planning as a central part of his or her life is the difference between a person who rides a bicycle and a person who drives a car. Both will get you from point A to point B, but the car, personal strategic planning, will get you there much faster and easier.

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Fortunately, personal strategic planning is a systematic way of thinking and acting. It is therefore learnable, like learning to type with a typewriter or drive a car. There are many different elements of this key skill, but with practice, you can get into the rhythm of thinking and acting strategically for the rest of your life. When you do, your life and career will take off like a rocket. Your success will be assured.

Strategic Planning Saves Time and Money

The reason that strategic planning and thinking is so helpful is that it saves you an enormous amount of time and money. By thinking through the key questions and concepts of strategy, you very quickly find yourself doing more and more of the most important tasks that can move you toward your key goals. At the same time, you do fewer and fewer of those things that are not particularly helpful. You do more things right and fewer things wrong. You establish specific targets for the company and for everyone in it. You greatly improve your ability to measure and track results. You move onto the fast track in your work and in your life in general.

The purpose of corporate strategic planning and goal setting is to increase return on equity. Equity is defined as the actual amount of shareholder money invested and working in the enterprise. The aim of strategic planning in business is to reorganize and restructure the activities of the corporation so as to achieve a higher quality and quantity of outputs relative to inputs. It is to improve and increase financial results. It is to achieve superior profitability.

Overall, the goal of strategic planning is to enable the company to utilize its people and resources more effectively. The company will then function better than before. It will be in a superior position relative to its competition. This improvement can be measured in terms of higher sales, greater market share, better profitability, higher returns on invested assets and better positioning for the future.

Designing Your Life and Career through Goal Setting

Personal strategic planning is very similar. However, instead of return on equity, personal strategic planning is aimed at increasing your return on energy. Put another way, it is to increase your return on life.

The equity in a business is measured in terms of financial capital. Your personal equity, on the other hand, is measured in terms of your own human capital.

Your personal equity is composed of the mental, emotional and physical energies you have to invest in your career. Your goal should be to get the very highest return possible on the investment of yourself in everything you do. How well you invest yourself determines your income. This is the focal point of personal strategic planning.

Your Goals and Strategic Planning

You can tell that it is time to revisit your strategic plan when you are no longer getting the kind of results you want from your work or from your life. Whenever you feel frustrated or dissatisfied, for any reason, this is often an indication that you should sit down and ask yourself some good, hard questions. Whenever you experience resistance or stress, or you find yourself working harder and harder only to feel that you are getting fewer and fewer rewards, you should stand back and look at the possibilities of revising your strategy.

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There is one special quality that you can develop that will guarantee you greater success, accomplishment and happiness in life.  Of a thousand principles for success developed over the ages, this one quality or practice will do more to assure that you accomplish wonderful things with your life than anything else.  This quality is so important that, if you don’t develop it to a high degree, it is impossible for you to ever achieve what you are truly capable of achieving.

Personal Management and Self Discipline

The quality that I am talking about is the quality of self discipline.  It is a habit, a practice, a philosophy and a way of living.  All successful men and women are highly disciplined in the important work that they do.  All unsuccessful men and women are undisciplined and unable to control their behaviors and their appetites.  And when you develop the same levels of high, personal discipline possessed by the most successful people in our society, you will very soon begin to achieve the same results that they do.

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All great success in life is preceded by long, sustained periods of focused effort on a single goal, the most important goal, with the determination to stay with it until it is complete.  Throughout history, we find that every man or woman who achieved anything lasting and worthwhile, had engaged in long, often unappreciated hours, weeks, months and even years of concentrated, disciplined work, in a particular direction.  Fortunately the quality of self discipline is something that you can learn by continuous practice, over and over, until you master it.  Once you have mastered the ability to delay gratification, the ability to discipline yourself to keep your attention focused on the most important task in front of you, there is virtually no goal that you cannot accomplish and no task that you cannot complete.

The Qualities of Successful People

I have studied successful men and women for more than 30 years.  In the simplest of terms, successful men and women are those who work almost all the time on high value tasks.  Unsuccessful men and women are those who waste their time by wasting the minutes and hours of each day on low value activities.

You see, there is a “crowding out” principle in time and personal management.  It simply says that, if you spend all of your time on highly productive tasks, by the end of the day, you will have “crowded out” all the unproductive activities that might have distracted you from your real work.  On the other hand, if you spend your time on low value activities, those low value activities will crowd out the time that you need to complete the tasks that can make all the difference in your life.  And the key to this attitude toward time and personal management is always self discipline.

There are several disciplines that you need to develop if you want to achieve your full potential.  The first of these is the discipline of goals.  This means that you sit down with a pad of paper, a pen and ample time.  You think through and then make a written list of all the things you want to accomplish in the next one, two, three, four and five years.  You organize the list into the various areas of your life; your career, your money, your family, your health and the other parts that are important to you.  You set priorities among your goals and re-write your lists so that your most important goals are at the top.  You then take a separate sheet of paper and you make a list of all the things that you can think of doing, right now, to move you toward the attainment of your most important goals.

Fully 97% of adult Americans are trying to live their lives without clear, specific, written goals.  This is the same as setting off across an unknown country without a roadmap.  You may get somewhere eventually, but it will take you much longer, and it is far more likely that you will get lost, and waste an enormous amount of time, than if you planned your trip carefully, with a roadmap, and full information about the future terrain, before you started out.

Successful People Complete High Value Tasks First

The second discipline you need to develop for success is the discipline of planning.  Many people think that they are too busy to plan.  Or they don’t give themselves enough time to plan.  But our studies show that you will save ten minutes in execution for every minute that you invest in planning.  You will get a 1000% return on your time investment by taking the time to think through, in advance, what you are going to do in the hours and days ahead.

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Good time management is essential to your success. Using an effective time planner and master list you can achieve any goal you set your mind to. These are given time management tools and techniques that you should practice for maximum productivity and good personal organization. Each of them takes a little time to learn and master, but pays you back in greater efficiency and effectiveness for the rest of your life.

Use a Time Planner and Create a Master List

The first time management tool that you need is a time planner that contains everything you need to plan and organize your life. The best time planners, whether looseleaf binders or electronic versions, enable you to plan fro the year, the month, the week, and for each day.

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A good time planner will contain a master list where you can capture every task, goal, or required action as it comes up. This master list then becomes the core of your time-planning system. From this master list, you allocate individual tasks to various months, weeks, and days.

Work From a List

Every effective executive works from a daily master list. It is the most powerful tool ever discovered for maximum productivity. When you create your daily list, you begin by writing down every single task that you intend to complete over the course of the day. The rule is that you will increase your efficiency by 25 percent the very first day that you start using a list. This means that you will have two extra hours of productive time in an eight hour day from the simple act of making a list of everything you have to do before you start work. You can bring order out of chaos faster with a list than with any other time management tool.

Organize By Priority

Once you have a master list for your day’s activities, the next step is for you to organize this list in order of priority. Once your master list is organized, it becomes a map to guide you from morning to evening in the most effective and efficient way. This guide tells you what you have to do and what is more or less important. You will soon develop the habit of using your list as a blueprint for the day.

Time Management Systems

The variety of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and computer-based time planner systems available today is absolutely wonderful. No matter what you do, in whatever field, there are digital time management systems that you can tap into or load onto your personal computer to help organize every part of your life.

Organize Your Time

Set up a 45-file system. There is a simple method of organizing your time and your schedule for up to two years in advance. It is called the “45-file system.” This is a tickler file that lets you plan and organize your activities and callbacks for the next twenty-four months. This is how it works. First you get a box of forty-five files with fourteen hanging files to put them in. The forty-five files are divided as follows: There are thirty-one files numbered one through thirty-one for the days of the month. There are twelve files for the months of the year. January through December. The last two files are for the next two years. This is a wonderful system that you can also use with hanging files in your desk drawer.

Action Exercise

Get a time planner of some kind, whichever format you are most comfortable using (e.g digital or paper), and invest the time necessary to lean how to use it. The payoff in saved time and increased productivity will be enormous.

Topics included in this article include

Time Management

Time Planner

Master List

Everything you are today and everything you become in the future will be determined by the way you think and the way you use your time. Your attitude toward time is a critical factor in all you do and everything you accomplish.

The Law of Clarity

The clearer you are about your goals and objectives, the more efficient and effective you will be in achieving them. Clarity accounts for probably 80 percent of success and happiness. People with clear, written goals accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

Your Attitude and The Law of Priorities

Your attitude and ability to set clear and accurate priorities on your time determines the entire quality of your life. To achieve great things, you must always be concentrating on the small number of activities that contribute the greatest value to your life and your work.

The Law of Posteriorities

Before you start something new, you must discontinue something old. You can gain control of your life only to the degree to which you stop doing things that are no longer as valuable or as important to you as other thing you could be doing.

Get Paid More: Learn Your Most Valuable Asset

Your most valuable asset is your earning ability. Your ability to earn money is the most valuable asset you have. Your earning ability is a depreciating asset, like a car or a piece of equipment. You must continually maintain and upgrade the quality of your earning ability to keep yourself at the same high level of productivity, performance and output.

Time Management: The Law of Planning

Every minute spend in planning save ten minutes in execution. The purpose of “personal strategic planning” is for you to increase your “return energy,” and return on the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual capital you have invested in your life and career.

The Law of Rewards

Your rewards will always be determined by your results. You will always be paid in direct proportion to what you do, how well you do it, and the difficulty in replacing you. The fastest way to get paid more and promoted faster is for you to achieve a greater quality and quantity of results for your company and yourself.

The Law of Sequentiality

Time management enables you to control the sequence of events in your life. Your entire life today is the sum total result of the quality of your choices and decisions to this moment. If you are not happy with any part of your life, it is up to you to begin to make different choices and better decisions.

Action Exercise

Analyze the way you spend a typical day or a typical week. What are the things you need to do more of, sooner, in order to improve the quality and quantity of your output and results?

In 1928, the magazine Sales and Marketing Management surveyed American Businesses to determine how efficiently salespeople were using their time. They discovered that the average salesperson in America was only working 20 percent of the time, approximately one and one-half hours per day. This finding caused bells to go off throughout the sales industry. The idea that salespeople were only working ninety minutes per day became the emphasis for improved training, better time management skills, better supervision, and better control of the activities of salespeople.

Double Your Sales with Time Management

In order to do this, I teach what I call my minutes theory. It is based on a simple equation. If you are in sales today, 100 percent of your sales and your income are generated by the number of minutes that you spend face-to-face with prospects and customers. If you want to increase the number of sales or the amount of money you make, you must increase the number of minutes that you spend in actual selling activity, face-to-face with people who can, and will, buy from you.

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My theory says that if you double the number of minutes that you spend with customers, you will double your income, even if you do not improve in any other area of sales. If you manage your time and develop the habit of goal setting as the top salespeople do, so that you are spending more time with customers, your sales will increase immediately.

The Job of the Salesperson

Let us begin with the job description of the salesperson. The job description of the salesperson is to create and keep customers. The measure of effectiveness of a salesperson is how many new customers she creates, or resales she generates, in any given time period. Everything else that salesperson does is secondary to creating and keeping customers. Therefore, the only time a sales person is working is when he is face-to-face, head-to-head, and knee-to-knee with a prospect or customer.

Begin with Goal Setting

Achieving Peak Performance and excellent time management in sales begins with your setting clear income and sales goals for yourself. The act of sitting down and deciding, in writing, how much you want to earn, and how you are going to go about earning it, makes it far more likely that you will achieve those goals than if you didn’t set them at all. The goal-setting exercise I am about to share with you has led to the doubling and tripling of the incomes of many salespeople. It is powerful because it is simple and easy. You can learn it and apply it immediately.

Determine What You Will Have to Do

Once you have practiced the habit of goal setting and broken your income and sales goals down into monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly amounts, you then define these goals in terms of the activities necessary to achieve them. The critical element in this calculation is the factor of control. You cannot control your income or your sales on a day-to-day basis. They depend on too many other factors. But you can control your activities. You can determine and control what you do from morning to night, and as a result, you can indirectly control your income. If you engage in the activities necessary to make sales you want to make, you will inevitably achieve your sales goals.

Achieve Peak Performance

Once you have determined your sales goals and worked out an activity schedule for each day, you immediately go to work on yourself to upgrade your skills in your key result areas. One of the best uses of your time is to get better at the most important things you do. Your goal is to upgrade your skills so that you achieve more and better results in a shorter period of time.

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Your interactions with others consume as much time, if not more, than any other part of your day and if done wrong, can it be a huge time waster. Even technical workers spend up to 75 percent of their time communicating with coworkers. You can greatly increase the efficiency of your interactions by improving the quality of your communications.

Common Misunderstandings: A Major Time Waster

A major time waster is caused by misunderstandings between people about roles, goals, and responsibilities. People do not know what they are expected to do, how to do it, and by what time.

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Misunderstandings lead to inefficiencies, anger, frustration, and unhappiness. It often requires an enormous amount of time to clear up a misunderstanding and get matters back to normal.

Listen Carefully and Set Clear Priorities

Misunderstandings about priorities often lead to your working at the wrong job, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, and perhaps aiming at the wrong level of quality. Or the problem may be that you are working for the wrong person.

The single most important cause of positive feelings and high levels of motivation in work is defined as “knowing exactly what is expected.” On the other hand, the number-one complaint, or demotivator, of employees is to “not know what is expected.”

In order to perform at your best, you need absolute clarity about your job and what you are expected to do.

Poor Delegation

Poor delegation to others, or from others, leads to mistakes and frustration on the part of both the boss and the employee. It is a major time waster. Poor delegation causes even the most sincere talented people to do poor work or the wrong jobs. Therefore, they end up feeling frustrated and unhappy.

Save Time Through Lines of Authority

Unclear lines of authority and responsibility lead to time wastage. People do not know who is supposed to do what job, when is it be done, and to what standard of quality. People are left to wonder, who is supposed to report to whom? Who’s in charge? Who’s the boss?

Incomplete Information

Another major time waster in business is poor or incomplete information, which leads to erroneous assumptions and conclusions. It is amazing how often people jump to conclusions or make false assumptions on the basis of wrong information.

The very best managers take the time to ask questions, and they listen carefully to the answers before they make a decision. If there is a key piece of information that suggests a problem or difficulty, they double-check on this piece of information to make sure that it is accurate.

Aimless or Too Frequent Meetings

Too many meetings, or aimless meetings that proceed without an agenda, direction, or closure, are an enormous time waster at work. These are meetings that start and stop without any particular resolution. No problems are solved, no decisions are made, and no responsibilities are assigned. No deadlines are agreed upon for action.

Lack of Clarity Concerning One’s Job

People need to know everything that is happening in the company that affects their particular jobs. The very best companies are open and honest with all employees concerning those matters affecting the health of the company.

Employees need to know what is going on and how their jobs fit into the big picture. When employees are unclear or unsure, an enormous amount of time is lost as the result of conversations, discussions, and gossip, which lead to ineffective work behaviors and poor productivity.

Best Managers Take Action

Be crystal-clear in explaining to others exactly what is to be done, and to what standard of performance, and by what date. By following the above steps you save time and become a more efficient manager.

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The way you use your time largely determines everything that happens to you in life. All really successful people know that in order to achieve their goals they must be an excellent time manager. Your job is to become one of these high achieving men and women through personal time management.

Learn Personal Time Management

Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is “time poverty.” Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal lives. Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they feel. This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill leads a person to fall into the reactive/responsive mode of living. Instead of clearly deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around you. Pretty soon you lose all sense of control. You feel that your life is running you, rather than you running your life.

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Successful people know that personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through what is really important to you in life. What are your values? What do you stand for? What do you care about, or not care about? What would you sacrifice for? Pay for? Not pay for? These are the most important questions you ask when you set yourself the task of getting your personal time management in order. When you become an excellent time manager you will find which tasks are most important to you.

Successful People Decide What is Important

Once you have decided what is important to you, you must then decide upon your goals, both large and small, both short-term and long-term. As an exercise, imagine that you have no limitations at all. Imagine that you have all the time, money, contacts, influence, intelligence and opportunities in the world to be have and do anything you could possibly want. Dream a little. Dream big dreams whenever possible. All peak performing men and women allow themselves to dream before they sit down to the hard business of determining what they can and will do with their current resources.

If you are married, you and your spouse should sit down and write a dream list. This is a list of everything that you could want to do or have or be with your family. Design your ideal lifestyle. How would you organize your time from dawn to dusk, if you were completely free to choose? What great things would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail? If you won a million dollars cash, tax free, in the lottery tomorrow, how would you change your life? For the purpose of this exercise, with yourself or with your spouse, just decide what you really, really want and write it down.

Once you have allowed yourself to dream, the next step is to begin setting goals. Personal time management only makes sense if you organize it around specific things that you want to accomplish.

Become an Excellent Time Manager: Identify Your Goals

Successful people know that you need goals in three major areas of your life. First, you need family and personal goals. These are the reasons why you do the things you do. These are the reasons why you get up in the morning and go to work. These are the reasons why you work hard and upgrade your skills. These are the reasons why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your time.

The second types of goals are your business and career goals. These are the “how” goals, the means by which you achieve your personal goals or your reasons why. What do you have to do and be in your career in order to achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals and objectives? How will you achieve it? What do you need to do more of? What skills and abilities do you need to develop to stay ahead of the curve in your career? Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially if they are balanced with family and personal goals.

The third type of goals are your personal development goals. Remember, you can’t achieve very much more on the outside than you have first achieved on the inside. Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self development. You must continue to read, listen to audio tapes and attend courses. You must build yourself if you want to build your life. Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve. But in order to do it, you must go to work on yourself and never stop.

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To achieve your goals and become everything you are capable of becoming you must get your time under control. Psychologists generally agree that a “sense of control” is the key to feelings of happiness, confidence, power, and personal well-being. And a sense of control is only possible when you practice excellent time management skills.

Choices and Decisions

If the front side of the coin of success is the ability to set clear goals for yourself, then the flip side of the same coin is the ability to get yourself organized and work on your most valuable tasks, every minute of every day in order to achieve your goals. Your choices and decisions have combined to create your entire life to this moment. To change or improve your life in any way, you have to make new choices and new decisions that are more in alignment with who you really are and what you really want.

The Right Thing to Do

The only way that you can determine that is right or wrong, more or less important, high or low priority is by first determining your aim or goal at that particular moment. From that point forward, you can divide all your activities in to “A” activities or “B” activities. An “A” activity is something that moves you toward your goal, the faster and more directly the better. A “B” activity is an activity that does not move you toward a goal that is important to you.

Begin with a Task List

The basic tool of time management is a task, organized by priority, and used as a constant tool for personal management. The fact is that you can’t manage time; you can only manage yourself. That is why time management requires self-discipline, self-control, and self-mastery. Time management requires that you make the best choices and decisions necessary to enhance the quality of your life and work. Then you follow through on your decisions. Knowing time management skills that work for you will quickly improve your life and positively affect your workload.

Use Advance Planning to Achieve Your Goals

Begin today to plan every week in advance, preferably the Sunday before the workweek begins. Plan every day in advance, preferably the night before. When you make a task list of everything you have to do the following day, your subconscious mind works on that list all night long. When you wake up in the morning, you will often have ideas and insights to help you accomplish the items on your task list.

Improve Your Life Through Prioritization

In the process of managing your time, you must separate the urgent tasks from the important ones. Urgent tasks are determined by external pressures and requirements. You must do them immediately.

How to Improve Your Time Management Skills

Make a list of everything you would like to be, do, or have in the months and years ahead. Analyze your task list and select those items that can have the greatest possible consequences in your life.

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Thank you for reading this article about improving your time management skills through creating a task list. You can achieve your goals and improve your life through prioritization and developing a sense of control. Please share and comment below!

Gather in your resources, rally all your faculties, marshal all your energies, focus all your capacities upon mastery of at least one field of endeavor.

-John Haggai

The raw material of personal performance and productivity is contained in your physical, mental, and emotional energies. Your body is like a machine that uses food, water, and rest to generate energy that you then use to accomplish important tasks in your life and work. When you are fully rested, for example, you can get two times, three times, and five times as much done as when you are constantly tired or sleep deprived. This makes it extremely important to go to sleep and get a regular nights rest often.

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One of the most important requirements for you to be happy and productive is for you to guard and nurture your energy levels at all times.

How to Stop Procrastinating and Avoid Being Constantly Tired

The fact is, your productivity begins to decline after eight or nine hours of work. For this reason, working long hours into the night, although it is sometimes necessary, means that you’re usually producing less and less in more and more time.

The more sleep deprived you become, the worse the quality of your work will be and the more mistakes you will make. At a certain point, you can reach “the wall” and simply be unable to continue, like a battery that is run down.

Work at Your Own Pace

There are specific times during the day when you are at your best.  You can learn how to stop procrastinating by identifying these times and discipline yourself to use them on your most important and challenging tasks.

Most people are at their best in the morning, after a good night’s sleep. Some people are better in the afternoon. A few people are most creative and productive in the evening or late at night.

A major reason for procrastination is fatigue or being constantly tired and sleep deprived. You have no energy or enthusiasm. Like a cold engine in the morning, you can’t seem to get yourself started.

Whenever you feel sleep deprived and overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time, stop yourself and just say, “All I can do is all I can do.”

Sometimes the very best use of your time is to go home early and go to bed and sleep for ten hours straight. This can completely recharge you and enable you to get two or three times as much done the following day, and of a far higher quality, than if you had continued working long into the night.

Go to Sleep

According to many researchers, the average American is constantly tired and sleep deprived relative to the amount of work he or she is doing. Millions of Americans are working in a state of mental fog as the result of working too much and sleeping too little.

One of the smartest things you can do is to turn off the television and go to sleep by ten o’clock each night during the week. Sometimes, one extra hour of sleep per night can change your entire life.

Here is a rule for you. Take at least one full day off every week. During this day, either Saturday or Sunday, you must absolutely refuse to read, clear correspondence, catch up on things from the office or do anything else that taxes your brain. Instead, you go to a movie, exercise, spend time with your family, go for a walk or any activity that allows your brain to completely recharge itself. It is true that “a change is as good as a rest.”

Take regular vacations each year, both long weekends and one and two-week breaks to rest and rejuvenate. You are always the most productive after a restful weekend or a vacation.

When you go to sleep early five nights a week, sleep in on the weekends and taking one full day off each week you will have far more energy. This added energy will help you learn how to stop procrastinating and get started on your major tasks faster and with greater resolve than you ever could if you were tired out.

Be Happy By Guarding Your Physical Health

In addition to lots of rest, and to keep your energy levels at their highest, be careful about what you eat. Start the day with a high protein, low fat and low carbohydrate breakfast. Eat salads with fish or chicken at lunch. Avoid sugar, salt, white flour products or deserts. Avoid soft drinks and candy bars or pastries. Feed yourself as you would feed a world-class athlete before a competition, because in many respects, that’s what you are before starting work each day.

Aim to exercise about 200 minutes each week, the agreed-upon standard for excellent levels of fitness. This is equal to 30 minutes per day, and can be achieved by going for a walk before or after work, or walking short stretches during the day. You can swim, use exercise equipment or play different sports, but build exercise into your daily routine, just as if it was a business appointment.

By eating lean and healthy, exercising regularly and getting lots of rest, you’ll get more and better work done, easier and with greater satisfaction than ever before.

The better and less sleep deprived you feel when you start work, the less you procrastinate and the more eager you are to get the job done and get on with other tasks. High energy levels are indispensable to higher levels of productivity, more happiness and greater success in everything you do.

Thank you for reading this article about how to stop procrastinating and how you can be happy. When you find that you are constantly tired and sleep deprived, go to sleep early in order to start the next day in full force.

When you guard and nurture your body, success will follow. If you enjoyed this article, please share and comment below!

Go To Sleep and Maximize Your Personal Powers is a post from: Brian Tracy's Blog

“Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all of your energies on a limited set of targets.”

Nido Qubein

The key to success is the strategic management of your time. Most of the really important work you do requires large chunks of unbroken time to complete. Your organizational skills and ability to carve out these blocks of high value, highly productive time, is central to your ability to make a significant contribution to your work and your life.

FREE REPORT: Step-by-step guide on Goal Setting, a $20 value.

Successful people set aside a specific time period each day to phone prospects. Rather than procrastinating or delaying on a task that they don’t particularly like, they resolve that they will phone for one solid hour between 10:00 and 11:00 AM. They then discipline themselves to follow through on their resolutions.

Many business executives set aside a specific time each day to call customers directly to get feedback, or to return phone calls, or answer correspondence. Some successful people allocate specific 30-60 minute time periods each day for exercise. Many successful people read great books 15 minutes each night before retiring. In this way, over time, they eventually read dozens of the best books ever written.

The Key to Success is to Schedule Blocks of Time Through Strategic Management

The key to success of working in specific time segments is through the strategic management of your day and specifically scheduling a fixed time period for a particular activity or task. You must make work appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them. You set aside thirty, sixty and ninety minute time segments that you use to work on and complete important tasks.

Many highly productive people schedule specific activities in preplanned time slots all day long. These people build their work lives around accomplishing key tasks one at a time. As a result, they become more and more productive and eventually produce two times, three times and five times as much as the average person.

Successful People Use a Time Planner

A time planner, broken down by day, hour and minute, organized in advance, can be one of the most powerful, personal productivity tools of all. It enables you to see where you can consolidate and create blocks of time for concentrated work.

During this working time, you turn off the telephone, eliminate all distractions and work non-stop. One of the best work habits of all is for you to get up early and work at home in the morning for several hours. You can get three times as much work done at home without interruptions as you ever could in a busy office where you are surrounded by people and bombarded by phone calls.

Make Every Minute Count Through Polished Organizational Skills

When you fly on business, you can create your office in the air by planning your work thoroughly before you depart. When the plane takes off, you can work non-stop for the entire flight. You will be amazed at how much work you can go through when you work steadily in an airplane, without interruptions.

One of the keys to high levels of performance and productivity is for you to make every minute count. Use travel and transition time, what is often called “gifts of time” to complete small chunks of larger tasks.

Remember, the pyramids were built one block at a time. A great life and a great career is built one task, and often, one part of a task, at a time. Your job in time management is to deliberately and creatively organize the concentrated time periods you need to get your key jobs done well, and on schedule.

Thank you for reading this article about increasing your organizational skills and the importance of strategic management with regards to your time. If you enjoyed this article please share and comment below!

Create Large Chunks of Time Through Strategic Management is a post from: Brian Tracy's Blog