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Monday, August 30, 2010

ARTICLE 9 - TIME MANAGEMENT

Strategies of Time Management
Understanding, identifying and defining your long-term goals is the very first step for an effective time management. With the broader goal at the background, you can now set your short-term goals that may effectively lead you to achieving your long cherished long-term goals in your life.

In the process you may be facing situations that may not be to your liking and you may even contradict many of your decisions. The most commonly committed blunder in any time management is that many people are not willing to accept a reasonable life-style. For maintaining one’s health in a good condition, the person should get good nutrition, sufficient exercise and proper sleep.

Like this, there are certain other factors such as social relationship, desires, feelings, spiritual and intellectual needs, etc., for making one’s life fruitful and whole and the pathetic situation today is that we are not bothered to look into many of these aspects and lead our life in a very sorry state of affairs.

Despite the Time management being easy and very reasonably required to be practiced in one’s life, many people do not even bother to know about it, leave alone practicing it. Of late, if you have found that you are running short of time even for completing many of your regular schedules, then remember that you are becoming a part and parcel of a larger population that manage time very badly.

Few of the under mentioned strategies or suggestions can help you in your need for a better time management skills that you have been aspiring for long:

First understand your need and identify your long-term goals in clear terms. Keep a watch over your defined long-term goals and make a review at regular intervals. Your prime aim should be to achieve your long-term goals and hence you should not allow any of the trivial matters and unnecessary tasks to pose as a hindrance to your either long-term goal or your present balanced life style.

The main enemy in your life is your impulsive behaviour to a given situation or your needs. Ascertain and weigh all your needs and spontaneous urges thoroughly and take a calculated decision with your long-term goal in your mind. If you are a student studying in college or school, then proper time management is a must so as make your curriculum more meaningful and useful.

In case you miss or mess up any of the important appointments and assignments, then they may prove to be very costly in your academic career and as well as in your life. The resultant guilt feeling, anxious moments, frustration and other undesirable feelings that may creep or crop up in your mind unknowingly may be very detrimental and hence you should learn to prioritize your various actions and engagements so as to strike a balance in your life.

There is no hard and fast rule that will tell you to socialize less and study more, and in fact you yourself would even like to consider things the way it wanted to be. The idea behind this is to tell you to make your time spending on things and activities that may interest you and fits you. By this you can set your priorities or at least know your priorities and can start applying things whenever you are busy or encounter busy schedules.

The best possible method could be to start with preparing a to-do list on a daily basis. This article will offer a variety of useful tips on matters such as managing time skillfully and how to prioritize within the to-do list favorably. Time management skill is one of the most important of all skills for attaining success in field including your daily personal life and official life.

The following are the time tested and very reasonable techniques that have been learned and practiced by many people in sports, business, personal life, and in almost all fields for getting an advancement in their career or fulfillment. The under-mentioned skills are certain to guide you and make you to become adept in handling time, giving you undivided focus or attention in handling things and enable you to reap beneficial results in almost all the avocations that you get yourself engaged in.

To start with, make your idea about time clear and decide how to spend your time. A small introspection about your self can give you a wide perspective about your present activities and the amount of time spent for each activity or occasion. To get a still better idea about your time spending pattern, analyze the situations for a week and the arrived at estimate will be more or less realistic in nature.

Then break the findings based on various activities or subjects and now you can have in your hand your entire week’s data and the details about your spending of time on them. Now from the data available you will be in a better position to analyze where you wasted your time most and where you have spent your time less than required and you can come to many such conclusions by closely scrutinizing the findings.

If you are a student, then from such self-introspection, you can find out many related factors such as quality of study time, quantity of study time, when the concentration was at its peak, etc. Though this is only illustrative, you are at liberty to infer many things from the findings and according to your own liking.

At the first instance do not immediately jump to doing things in a precise clock work fashion, but learn to identify where you lack improvement of where you have to be little less intensive. Make use of the data to analyze where you are supposed to or rather not supposed to postpone things and where exactly you need to procrastinate or prevent things from doing altogether.

Note to set realistic and achievable goals with a little bit of flavor of challenge in it. Consider the fact that there will be people who will be able to manage time well and at the same time do blunders with time management.

The time that is required to complete a job might be different for different people at different point of time and depending upon many other influencing factors. At the beginning always set your task small and break them into achievable sizes with a little flavor of challenge. Once you finish your job of identifying the task or tasks, then comes the job of visualizing or devising strategies for achieving the set goals.

Consider giving a break in your schedule for every one-hour and every half an hour if the job is more intensive or arduous. Arrange all your necessities such as work, meals, study materials, etc., at the initial stages itself. If it relates to study then be realistic in your selected courses. For any success in completing selected courses you need to study and practice what have been studied.

Make sure that whatever you have selected is not taxing, lest the whole exercise might turn out to be a futile one due to abrupt stopping or discontinuance in the middle. You should be careful in making things to conform to your budget and schedule the time in such a way so as to make the time work for you to accomplish the undertaken task.

If you need to be more structured in your work, then you should prepare your schedule in a more detailed manner and at the same time be more realistic and be prepared with a open mind to make changes wherever and whenever necessary. Such type of modular or structured approach can leverage you with more time and for doing things in an efficient way.

SOURCE: http://www.management-hub.com/time-management.html

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