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Effective Time Management Strategies

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Effective time management strategies for achieving personal goals

By Juliet du Preez

Effective time management is a tool for you to achieve what you want in life and enjoy things as much as possible. Here are some strategies for getting it right:

The Task and Your Goals

There are many activities in our life that we possibly don’t see as linked to our personal goals.

If we let them, these can consume our lives so that we don’t appear to have the time we want in order to focus on achieving our important goals. What you need to do is to ensure that each of your activities serves a purpose in your life.

It may seem difficult to link something such as paying the bills or house cleaning to a personal goal but, if you think about it, the bills enable you to enjoy the services or comforts they provide and you may want a clean house for pride, or efficiency or health.

Even the smallest (and most unpleasant) task needs to have a place in the direction of your life.

Find information for achieving your personal goals!

What’s Urgent And What’s Important?

You need to stop the habit of dealing with everything as and when it lands in your life. You must assess whether it fits into your life and, if so, when it should be handled.

For this you need to know what is urgent and what is important. Then you can make a decision as to how to handle it:

• If something is urgent, but not important, you don’t need to deal with it now
• If something is urgent and important, fit it in as soon as possible
• If something is not urgent but important, slot it into your schedule somewhere – it doesn’t have to be now
• If something is not urgent and not important, get rid of it. This means, delegate or discard

See the time management matrix for more information on prioritizing.

How Long Does It Take?

One of time management strategies which is of utmost importance is to know how long a task is going to take – or at least be able to give a realistic estimate.

If you can’t do this, you may:

• Not assign enough time to the activity and end up being stressed or even procrastinating because you know you won’t get it done
• Fall into wishful thinking that somehow the task will get done – even though your plans are unrealistic
• Think you will take the same amount of time to do something as others and come short because of that
• Take longer than necessary to complete a task because you have assigned too big a time slot to it

Using Time Wisely

If you are getting stuck with something or can’t get started try these:

• Put a time limit on it. If you have a short amount of time to spend on it, you might get at least a bit done
• Approach the task from a different angle
• Chunk it down into smaller pieces

Continuous Improvement

Review your planner on a daily basis in order to see where you may have slipped up.

Figure out what went wrong and how you can prevent or improve on that aspect going forward. You also need to review your planner at least once a month to monitor if there are aspects that simply aren’t working.

A time management system is not fixed. It changes as your life and needs change.

These are some simple time management strategies that can help you to optimize your time and be more effective in achieving those things that are important to you.

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