Time Management Skills

Do you feel that you don't have enough time to do all that you want? Do you think that priorities in your life are done at the expense of hobbies and activities? Did you quit exercising since you started working? If your answers are yes then it's obvious you feel short of time. The truth however, is that there is plenty of time, you just don't know how to use it best.

What is Time Management

Time management is organizing your activities in a period of time in order to get them all done while maintainng the balance between them. Time management and goal setting are usually associated because the people who need to manage their time are usually people whose goals are limited by deadlines.

Introduction to Time Management Skills

When people try to manage their time or set schedules they are always faced with problems that make those schedules fail. This causes them to lose faith in using timed schedules. By understanding those problems you will able able to set up a time management plan that includes solutions to them and thus be successful. The problems are:

Not being in the mood to do a certain task right now. An example would be a scheduled 15 minute run starting at 8 to 8:15. If it's 8 o'clock and you simply don't feel like running, you will most probably have some kind of inner conflict and your schedule will fail.
Unexpected events, for example falling ill, will wreak havoc with your schedule. So if you were planning on studying tomorrow, but suddenly fell sick, your schedule would be useless.
Planning an overambitious schedule will result in not having enough time to do everything that you wanted on the same day. This is especially true of type A personalities.

Time Management Plan

The previous reasons are why most time management plans fail. Below is a complete plan that will help you to overcome all of these problems:

Divide your day into a number of zones: Dividing your day into 3 zones, one from 9 to 4, the second from 4 to 10 and the third from 10 to 12 is a good example. You can divide your day into any number of zones and calculate how many zones you have per week based on this division. Thus 3 zones per day will yield a 21-zone week.
Next bring your list of goals and decide how many zones a week each activity should take. For example, studying may be assigned seven zones per week, running three zones per week ....etc. But what's the point of using zones? Using the concept of zones has the great advantage of overcoming the problem of not being in the mood to do a certain activity. For example, on finding that you don't feel like studying, you can simply move the studying zone to another day and do something else instead that can be done now without impacting the total number of zones alloted to each task. This way you can avoid doing something you don't feel like doing and still have your plan unaffected.
Using the same concept as creating zones, you should have a number of free zones so that when you face an unexpected event that takes up one of your assigned zones, you will just move the scheduled activity to one of the free zones and avoid upsetting your schedule. For example, if you woke up late, wasting one zone, you could assign this zone to one of the free ones and not impact your plan.
If nothing unexpected occurs causing you to reassign an activity to a free zone, you can use the free zones to do more work, either as a bonus, or as zones taken from next week's plan.
The more short-term your plan is, the less accurate it will be. Thus planning what to do in the next two hours could be a total failure because something as simple as a phone call or an unexpected visit can blow your plans away. The preferred time span used in time management is usually one week.

Using the concept of zones also overcomes the problem of not having enough time in a single day since planning on a weekly basis provides much more flexibility and control over time than planning on a daily basis. Imagine that you planned to study in the next two hours and suddenly had an unexpected visitor. What will you do?? Therefore the longer the span of time your management plan includes, the more control you will have.
In addition to all the previous guidelines, you should determine the priority of each of your activities. Studying, hanging out and exercising should each be given a priority and, in case of a conflict between two or more activities, the one with the least prioriy should be dropped. Priorities are not constant however, and could be changed at a later time, for example, being in a bad mood could give hanging out the highest priority.

Time Management and Living Longer

This is not just a title, you can actually end up living longer than others through correct management of your time, simply because loosing few hours a day means losing one complete year each few years, by correctly managing your time you wont only outperform your peers but you will also end up living longer!!

Did that help?

No, what if I don't have any free time to manage?

Tell me how can time management make me live longer?

I didn't find my question here.

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