Time Management Practices
The concept of time management is much more important today than it was in the past. We live in a fast paced world where information moves at the speed of light, and people are working harder and longer.
How you manage your time will determine how successful you become in various aspects of your life. Many people wish to become wealthy, but fail to realize that how they manage their time will play a role in their ability to create wealth. For example, if you talk to most self made millionaires, you will find that few of them spend large amounts of time watching television.
Why? Because they know that it is a waste of time. How many hours do you spend each week watching television? This is time that could spent studying information about how to build wealth. It could be spent performing market research, or finding new ways to save money. In addition to this, it is time that can be spent learning the skills that will be necessary for you to succeed. This is something that most wealthy people understand. They don’t watch much television because they are too busy building wealth. It is their ability to properly manage their time that allows them to become successful.
Many people that are not successful waste time doing things that simply don’t matter. After working eight hours at a job, they spend hours watching television, talking on the phone, or playing video games. Or they go out to bars or clubs and spend hours there. While there is nothing wrong with these things, spending too much time doing them will lead to failure. If you want to become good at managing you time, you will want to look at your life. Just as you would want to save money in order to build wealth, you will also want to save time in order to perfect your time management skills.
If you are like most people, you have goals. There are things you want in life. This may be a house, car, or millions of dollars. Perhaps you want to be an Olympic athlete or a famous musician. But there is a problem. Most of the people who want these things never achieve them. Why? Because they don’t make the time to do so. They allow themselves to get caught up in things that are not important, and before they know it, their entire lives have passed them by, and they have not achieved the things they wanted. If you talk to most lawyers, they will charge you for the amount of time they spend talking to them. Why? Because their time is valuable to them, and for clients to use their time, they must be compensated.
To become skilled at time management, you will first want to create a goal. Each day, you will want to be focused on achieving that goal. Anything that is not related to you achieving your goal is irrelevant, and you will not want to waste time with it. If you want to become an athlete, you will want to practice every day. If your friends want you to go to the arcade at a time you need to practice, tell them that you can’t. Going to the arcade is not important. Practicing the sport is important, and the arcade can wait. This is called prioritizing your activities. You place an emphasis on what is important, and reserve of the rest of the time you have for doing things which aren’t important.
This is one of the things that separates people who succeed from people who fail. You will want to create a list each day of the things you will need to do in order to move towards achieving your main goal. I say main goal because it is the end result of the tasks you are carrying out each day. The daily tasks that you are performing are called minor goals. The completion of the minor goals will allow you to attain the main goal. The only thing that should come between you and your daily goals is an emergency. When I say an emergency, I’am referring to a death in the family or an illness. Other than this, nothing should stand in the way of you and the tasks you must complete to achieve your goal.
