Creating a Powerful Time Management Plan for Success

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Putting some effort into creating a time management plan is a must if you want to lead a fulfilling life. The time that you have will always be filled in one way or another.

If you don’t plan your time, it will be wasted!

The most important first step in creating your time management plan is to schedule your priorities in your week.

But first, let’s find out how you are spending your time with the help of a time log.

Here’s how to do it…

For a week record exactly what you are doing each day. I mean exactly. Have a piece of paper at hand and write down each task that you undertake with the amount of time you spend on it – even if you’re having coffee!

Once you have this information, you can see how much time you are spending on each area of your life. Here you need to use some sort of breakdown of life areas.

For example: self, work, relationship, health etc. Whatever suits you.

Then go through your week and place each task that you did into one of these buckets and add up the amount of time you spent in each life area. Now you can get an idea as to where your time goes. You can also determine the percentage of time that you spend in each area per week.

There are 168 hours in the week. So, if you spent 40 hours at work, you spent about 24% of your time working.

You may be quite surprised at what you find.

Did you spend your time wisely? Decide what you want in terms of hours per life area per week.

Now we get to the importance of goals. If you don’t have specific goals for the various life areas and know what you need to do in order to achieve them, you will muddle through your weeks getting nowhere.

This is an example of what you want to have:

Life area: Health
Goal: Get fit and lose 3kg
Activity: Run for half an hour for four days a week

Do this for every life area (you can have more than one goal per area) and then create a time management plan. Here are the basic steps:

• You need a planner. This must show each day of the week and have each day split into time intervals. These could be hourly or 15 minutes slots.

• Now that you have your week laid out in front of you, mark off the timeslots where you're not free. For example, an art class on Thursday evening from 6 to 9. If there is drive-time involved, include that.

• All activities that are goal-related should be made your top priority. Now, determine how long the activity will take.

• Then see where it is best to slot these activities into your planner.

Now, schedule all your priorities into your week (for more information on this topic, see how you can hone your prioritization skills here to find out how to manage your time effectively).

You need to work around your current commitments but also cater for your preferences. For example, does it benefit you more to exercise before or after work?

In the process you are going to have to determine ways of eliminating tasks that don’t fit in with your goals and optimizing some of your current activities.

For the moment you have the basics of a creating a successful time management plan.

You can now test, refine and continuously rework it in order to make it optimal.

Creating a time management plan – contributed by Juliet du Preez