Effective time management
Time management techniques are a way to make the best use of your time. We all (rich and poor alike) have the same number of hours available to us in a day, a week, a month, or a year. It’s how we use these hours which is important.
Prioritization
Proper prioritization is essential to effective time management. Whoever you are, there are only twenty four given hours in a day. You need to sleep, eat, bathe and perform a number of other activities. There will always be more things that you would like to do than there is time to do them. If you don’t prioritize tasks, you would simply change from one task to another without rhyme or reason. This would not only be totally inefficient, it could also result in essential tasks being left incomplete. It is therefore important that one must learn to differentiate between the important and the optional.
Create Your ‘To Do’ List
Prepare a to-do list every morning. It will help you stay focused and accomplish more in a day.
Most successful people use ‘TO DO’ lists. They range from the top CEOs of multi-national companies to entrepreneurs of small businesses. You can use these lists to keep you focused on what really needs to be done, and keep you away from un-important tasks that have no value.
Make it a daily record
Every day you should make a ‘To Do’ list. You’ll find it helpful in deciding where your priorities lie. Write down all your outstanding tasks on a sheet of paper, then carefully go through deciding if an item is to be graded as :- A. Urgent. B. Important but not urgent. C. Neither urgent nor important. Each morning you must update your ‘TO DO’ list.
Then review the list and start on the top priorities, crossing off each one as it is finished throughout the day.
Start That Important Task Now!
There are many tasks which because of their complexity are difficult to start. There are always other (and sometimes less important) tasks which are far easier to complete. But you can’t put down an important task for long. So if you find a task overwhelming, break it into several small tasks and deal with one at a time.
