MANAGING YOUR TIME
Hi, todays topic is time management and we will start with a quote from Peter Drucker. “TIME IS THE SCARCEST RESOURCE OF THE MANAGER; IF IT IS NOT MANAGED, NOTHING ELSE CAN BE MANAGED.”
Time is our most precious asset. You can’t get more of it. Time is constant and irreversible. Thus, time needs to be efficiently managed to be effective. Once wasted, it can never be regained. People are not born productive and instant change cannot happen. From some emergency situations we know that time can be stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. If your car stop working, you will find the time to repair it. So, the key of time management is treating our priorities. “I don’t have time” often means “It’s not a priority”. I can tell you I don’t have time to dust my blinds but that’s not true. If you offer me to pay 10000 euros to dust my blinds, I would do it quickly. I can acknowledge it is not matter of lacking time, it’s I don’t want to do it. Using this language remind us that TIME IS A CHOICE. Time management means staying on top of your time, life, and activities. The important skills trio of effective person includes discipline, time and goals management.
The most common way to manage time is to use planner and calendar – on your desktop, in your bullet journal, on your phone. It doesn’t matter where – but you need to use it. Create a powerful morning routine, block out distractions and make use of a planner and again make use of a planner. Remember that 10 minutes of planning “saves” 1 hour per day.
Time management allows you to take control of your life rather than following the flow of others. Leaders have a host of responsibilities that keep their schedules tight, and often overflowing. From managing a team, to securing new projects and looking for new opportunities, leaders are tasked with juggling multiple tasks at once. Therefore, effective leaders put their time management skills into play to ensure that they maximize their time and accomplish their goals. THERE IS THE SIMPLE RULE: IF YOU SAY “YES” TO SOMETHING, YOU INSTANTLY SAY “NO” TO SOMETHING ELSE.
PRIORITIZE YOUR TIME – PRIORITIZE YOUR TASKS
PREPARE IN ADVANCE. A major benefit of preparing your daily task list the night before is that this exercise clears your mind and enables you to sleep deeply. You will be relaxed and refreshed next day.
REWARD YOURSELF for practicing the new behavior. Each time you reward yourself, you reaffirm and reinforce that behavior. You can reward yourself with checking emails AFTER you finish your task.
People sit down, and they say, well, before I make a list, Ill check a little email, check a little spam, send something to my friends, see what’s going on YouTube, and so on and so forth, and then they look up and its 10 o’clock. And they haven’t anything of value. So what you do is you have to start it on your most important task. And do it until it becomes a habit. And here’s an interesting thing about checking email. When you check email, it triggers the release of dopamine in your brain. Dopamine give us sense of pleasure. Dopamine is triggered every time we have a shiny object, or something new or different or interesting or sparkling. If a telephone rings next to you, you go, Bing, your brain releases endorphins, and you can’t hardly wait to see what it is. Everything stops, and You check your mobile phone.
If you’re working on a task, it takes an average of 17 minutes to get back to the task. Average adult is checking their email and their phone between 95 and 145 times a day. Which means most people are like attention deficit disorder persons and are wasting too much time.
If you start and complete a task, you get a feeling of being a winner which gives you an infusion of energy, and inspiration. Then you complete another task, and another…and get that feeling again and again.
However, the BENEFITS OF TIME MANAGEMENT far outweigh the work required. Time is money, but not all tasks result in the same financial benefit only. As a part of this lecture you will find In Online course a pdf file A LIST OF LIFE BENEFITS OF TIME MANAGEMENT.
Last but not least, please CHECK IN THE LEADERSHIP MANUAL THE TABLE SHOWING HOW TO PRIORITIZE TASKS. It will be a good tool to help you with your time management. Enjoy it!
SOURCES:
- Sabina Morosini, Joyful Leadership Manual
- Osborne, C. (2015.). Leadership. New York, NY, US: DK Publishing