Why do people struggle with time management?
Time management isn’t just about planning your day and then trying to stick to your plan. Without the knowledge and skill of true time management, almost everyone struggles to stay focused.
Why is this so?
It’s because when someone wants to get better at managing their time, they sign up for a one-day time management course that teaches them how to set their goals, plan activities to achieve them, how to plan their week, and then how to plan their day.
They leave this course excited, with all this new knowledge and time management plan, arrive at work the next day ready to implement their plan, and find that, at the end of the day, they have struggled to accomplish anything on their plan. This continues to happen throughout the week and by the end of the second week the plan and course are just a memory and they are back to their old habits.
Why did this happened?
It’s because 1. Time management cannot be learned in one day. 2. It is your thought patterns and habits that need to change and very few if any time management workshops focus on this side of time management.
There are two phases to time management training;
1. Development of knowledge and processes.
2. The continuous process of consolidating knowledge and forming skills and habits.
These 2 phases are made up of 4 key components;
1. Hours
2. Time management
3. Self discipline
4. People management skills
1. Hours
Time management is impossible if you don’t have a plan. The plan determines which activities are important to you and therefore must be done first to achieve your goals in business and in life. With a plan, you know where to best use your time.
Steps to build your plan
has. why – The planning process is about understanding why you do what you do. Understanding why is very important to help you do and achieve what is really important to you and to keep you focused during difficult times.
b. Vision – Vision is the image you have in your head of what you want to achieve. Put it on paper, it helps to clarify and solidify what you want to achieve.
against Objectives/Objectives – Your main goals come from your vision, they are the goals you seek to achieve your vision. You can set your goals in 1, 3, 5, 10, or 20-year time frames; However, if that seems unrealistic to you, just set yourself some goals for the next 12 months and focus on creating a plan to achieve them.
d. quarterly action plan – This is the point where planning begins to intersect with time management. In a quarterly action plan, create a plan for the next 3 months. In this plan you set your goals for the quarter and each month of the quarter. Then you establish the activities that you will carry out in each week of the month to achieve those objectives.
2. Time management
Time management is all about setting your plans on a weekly and daily basis, determining what day and time activities will take place.
has. Weekly planning – With your quarterly action plan and your dairy system, you plan on which day the action plan activities will be completed. You also plan your appointments, family, social and any other activity you intend to do that week.
b. daily planning – it’s all about scheduling your activities for the day, creating a to-do list that you prioritize, and then sticking with those priorities no matter what. The way you set your prioritization of this list is very important, the way most courses teach you to prioritize is incorrect and results in only today’s focused tasks being completed and not being reached the goals. Our method of prioritizing tasks each day results in our clients completing more of the important activities on time.
3. Self discipline
Without self-discipline, building new and better time management skills just won’t happen. The process has to start from within you.
has. Avoid procrastination – There are many excuses for why we put things off, but the simple fact is that every time we avoid doing something that is important, we are destroying our success. We need to learn to control the way we think about various activities and complete them in their sequence of importance.
b. Entertainment – The inability to stay focused on an important activity for a set period of time prevents us from achieving the success we desire. Allowing ourselves to be constantly distracted by a variety of things like emails, phone calls, SMS, new apps, new technology, social media, shiny new stuff, etc. etc. means it takes more and more time to get things done.
Every time you get distracted from doing something important, it takes 10 to 20 minutes for you to return to the presence you had before you got distracted. You need to create a methodology for how you allow yourself to be distracted for short periods of time between important activities.
4. People management skills
One of the biggest obstacles to achieving good time management skills and habits is interruptions from other people. Team members, clients, suppliers, families, etc. It is important that you identify what interrupts you during the day and create an action plan to eliminate those interruptions.
There is a lot to learn about managing people, however from a time management perspective, there are some key things to learn that will help you make up hours in your day.
has. Learn how to teach your employees how to solve their own problems and make the decision you pay them to do it, instead of coming to you all the time. If you are someone who requires employees to make decisions and not make them themselves, you will always have problems with time management. It is not a good management style.
b. Learn to communicate with people effectively. Everyone has a primary behavior style and a primary learning modality. When you learn to communicate with someone based on their primary behavioral style and learning modality, communication is significantly more effective and saves you an enormous amount of time.
Recommendation
As you can see, learning how to build better time management skills is not a one day event. Gaining the basic knowledge in each of these 4 areas can be done quickly, actually building full knowledge and turning it into valuable skills takes much longer.
The way to implement the development of your time management skills is to incorporate into your goals and activity planning, the skills that you identify need to be developed in the areas of Self-Discipline and People Management Skills.
I also recommend that you have someone you meet with regularly (at least once a month) who can help you further develop your knowledge and skills and hold you accountable for implementing your quarterly action plans.
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