Good time management skills require habit changes and self-discipline that most of us haven’t been willing to accept.
The starting point of developing good time management skills is to realize that it is really life management. It is how you take care of your most precious gift: time.
As you get better and more effective at managing the minutes and hours of your day, the building blocks of your life, the more you will accomplish at a higher quality. You will enjoy higher levels of self-esteem and self-respect.
Let’s be clear that time management behaviors are very much a matter of choice. You choose to be efficient or disorganized, and you choose to focus on your highest-value tasks or spend your time on activities that contribute little value to your life or work. And you are always free to choose.
The first two steps to becoming extremely efficient at time management are understanding why it is important to you and identifying your key goals. If you are unclear on what you are trying to accomplish and why it becomes difficult to assess which items on your list are the priority.
Here are 5 ways you can take action today to manufacture more time in your day.
1. Commit today that you will become excellent at thinking through and working exclusively on your top priority tasks. Never allow exceptions until this becomes a habit.
2. Apply the 80/20 Rule to every part of your business and personal life; identify the top 20% of activities, customers, products, services, and tasks that account for 80% of the value, and focus on them before anything else.
3. Make a list of activities each day before you begin, and set careful priorities on your list. Identify the top priority items on your list by deciding what will have the largest impact on moving you and your business forward and what is most time sensitive. Always work on your most important tasks first. Then DO IT NOW and don’t procrastinate!!! This is critical to moving you forward.
4. Delegate with thought, effectively. Outsource the right task to the right person at the right level of independence.
5. Every hour of every day, ask yourself, “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?” Whatever the answer, be sure that you are working on that task, the one that can make a greater difference than anything else.
Choose one of the steps I mentioned above and start using it every day. It will feel hard, cumbersome, and uncomfortable at first. That’s okay! I can help you and support you! You are building a new habit of being more efficient.
There is so much struggle to being a business owner, and sometimes it can be lonely. Empowered Leadership is a coaching business helping businesses find freedom through business coaching, executive coaching, assessments, or training.
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