Author: Peter Kirkham | Total views: 191 Comments: 2
Word Count: 549 Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 1:49 AM

21 Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Time Management Skills & Squeeze More Into Your Day

Never before have time management skills been as important as they are now. Life today is extremely busy for most of us. In the private sector, ask any working mother or a college student working part time to pay for an education. And in the business sector, ask any business owner trying to juggle a number of priorities at the one time.

With improved time management skills we can make the shift from reactive to pro-active, we can set goals and have the time to work towards them. It's no secret that those of us who can manage our time better, get more things done.

When one has the time to give priority to the issues in our daily business or private lives that need urgent attention, the stress levels drop & we're able to manage our resources in a more effective manner.

Here's 21 Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Time Management Skills

1. Be decisive

2. Set clear goals & objectives

3. Set a daily work plan, the night before

4. Prioritise tasks using A - B - C - D then re-prioritise A tasks using 1 - 2 - 3 to identify the most urgent

5. Separate the urgent from the important

6. Use the law of enforced efficiency, what is the highest value use of your time?

7. Use the 80/20 rule to improve your time management skills by identifying the tasks that will have the greatest benefit & do those first

8. Develop stamina & high energy through regular exercise & diet

9. Develop single-handling skills to concentrate on one task at a time

10. Eat the ugly toad first, do the hardest thing first up

11. Organise your workspace by using the acronym TRAF: Toss - Refer - Action - File

12. Use travel time to listen to educational CD's & prepare work schedules

13. Develop expertise in key tasks through practice & repetition

14. Work in real time, at a fast tempo & develop an ongoing sense of urgency

15. Time management skills generally improve automatically when you learn to make decisions quickly, with no ifs or buts

16. Re-engineer work processes, map them out & identify what needs to be done and works towards reducing the number of steps by 30%

17. Reinvent yourself once a year. Identify what you need to do to become more productive because the only constant in life is change

18. Ask yourself the following on a regular basis - knowing what I know right now, would I do things the same way

19. Set priorities, identify what tasks you can procrastinate on, that is, the lower priorities can wait. The 80% of tasks that have less value and only contribute 20% of the productivity

20. Decide to work to live, not live to work. This means working towards a balanced life. It's the quantity of time on downtime and the quality of time at work to aim for

21. Be intensely action orientated. It's acting & executing that generates results

There you have it, 21 ways to improve YOUR time management skills. Implememt just a few and you'll be way ahead of the pack.

About the Author

Author & small business owner Peter Kirkham has written a terrific collection of small business ideas & proven, low cost marketing strategies that shows the small business owner how to increase profits & create a steady flow of new customers into his business... FOREVER. They are all available in his
FREE Customer Attraction Kit.

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Comments

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 at 4:21 AM, by elizabeth
that is a lot of work to manage your time. who will have time to do anything with that long list. lol

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 at 10:37 AM, by Peter
Hey Elizabeth,

Thank you for your comment, much appreciated.

I guess I could argue that if you managed your time better, you'd have the time to do it... but I won't.

I remember years ago when an apprentice printer working under me was amazed at how efficient I was setting up & running a press.

I was working on a bonus system & beaking records left, right & centre.

So one day I sat him down along side my press & asked him to watch.

The next I sat down & watched him.

Her was absolutely stunned at what he had achieved by just seeing how simple it really was to plan your next step & 'hit the ground running'

So yes Elizabeth, to implement all the points would definatley be a huge task but to implememt 20% of them would be relatively easy.

Don't you think?

Cheers,
Peter

It's the 80/20 rule really, implement just 20% of them and improve your time management by 80%achieve an 80% increase As mentioned in my article, if you could implent

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