BY Brian Tracy
Success in almost everything involves time management. It seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything that you need to do accomplished, but if you want to achieve much more than others in a shorter amount of time, you must improve how you manage that time.
Time management refers to how you schedule and organize your time for different activities. There are many different tools, and techniques to help you get more done in less time.
Here are some time management tips that will help you organize and manage the 24 hours in your day as efficiently as possible.
The Importance of Time Management
Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value.
All work requires time.
The very act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to improve your personal time management and increase productivity immediately.
I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a calculator or a cell phone.
It was something that you used to increase productivity and eventually be paid more money. Then I learned that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.
Eat That Frog!
“The first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog.” – Mark Twain
Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat that frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worse things that is going to happen to you all day long.
Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.
If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first.
Discipline yourself to begin immediately and then to persist until the task is complete before you go on to something else.
If You Have To Eat A Live Frog At All, It Doesn’t Pay To Sit And Look At It For Very Long
The key to reaching high levels of time management, performance, and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning.
You must develop the routine of “eating your frog” before you do anything else and without taking too much time to think about it.
Successful, effective people are those who launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly until those tasks are complete.
“Failure to execute” is one of the biggest problems in organizations today. Many people confuse activity with accomplishment. They talk continually, hold endless meetings, and make wonderful plans, but in the final analysis, no one does the job and gets the results required.
There Are No Shortcuts
Practice is the key to mastering any skill.
Fortunately, your mind is like a muscle. It grows stronger and more capable with use. With practice, you can learn any behavior or develop any habit that you consider either desirable or necessary.
What is your “frog?” What is the one task that you despise doing each day? Once you have chosen your “frog” make it a habit to wake up every morning and do that task first.
How to Manage Time Effectively
In order to make more money, you must learn how to manage time effectively. There are two major sources of value in the world of work today. The first is time and the second is knowledge.
Today, time is the currency of modern business. By using these 5 techniques to manage your time, you will put yourself on the fast track to success.
1. Develop A Sense Of Urgency
The most important measure of time is speed. The most important quality that you can develop with regard to time management is a “sense of urgency.”
A sense of urgency is the habit of moving fast when opportunity presents itself to you. Develop a bias for action. Fast tempo is essential to success. All successful people not only work hard, hard, hard, but they work fast, fast, fast!
2. Stop Procrastinating
Procrastination is not only the thief of time; it is the thief of life. You must develop the time management habit of moving quickly when something needs to be done. You must develop a reputation for speed and dependability.
As a general rule, small tasks should be done immediately, as soon as they appear. This habit of taking action quickly will enable you to get through an enormous amount of work in a day. It will earn you a reputation for being the kind of person to give jobs to when someone needs them done quickly.
3. Work In Real Time
Whenever possible, do your work in “real time,” as soon as it comes up. Stay focused and do it now. It is amazing how much time you can waste by picking up a task and looking at it or starting it, and then putting it down and coming back to it again and again.