How to manage your time wisely?

Effective Time Management in the path to success

As a revisit, lets see the steps in the Path to Success,

1. Belief

2. Setting Goal

3. Targets

4. Time Management

In our last post in the series, we saw about Setting Targets. Lets see how to prioritize the targets and achieve what we want. 

There is a saying "When we correctly plan, we achieve 50% of what we intent to do". But the real success is in achieving the remaining 50%. 

We have created our Goal and set the targets. In ideal scenario, the next steps are completing the targets and achieving the Goal. But, in real world, you cannot simply do it. 

When you have the Todo list for a day in handy and intent to do it, you may find a large number of additional tasks pouring in or some of the tasks in our list may sound boring or tough to do. The real journey to success begins here, when you resist your mind to skip the unimportant tasks and face the important ones. 

Lets see how to accomplish that.

Time Management:

One common thing among all successful people are, all of them are good at Time Management. They spend time wisely and in organized manner. They expect the best but prepare for the worst.

Path to Success - Time Management
Credit: Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

What is Time Management?

Everyone of us are having 24 hours a day. Not even the world's wealthiest man can buy an additional minute. But the secret of success lies in how we utilize our time. 

Am I organized? Have I prioritized my tasks? Do I know what I am really doing? - These are some of the basic questions we have to ask ourselves to avoid wasting time. 

In simple worlds, spending quality time and getting more results in less time in a day is considered good time management.

How to do Time Management?

The Pareto principle, also known as 80/20 rule suggests, our 20% of work is the cause of our 80% results. The remaining 80% work is only contributing to our 20% of results. 

Our real success is in identifying which 20% of our tasks are contributing to our 80% of success and completing them without fail. One thing about time management is, we are never going to caught up with all the tasks in our hand. There will always be rescheduling/delegation of work. So a smart person will do the tasks from the important 20% first.

How to identify my important 20%?

Take your todo list. For every task in your list, ask these questions to yourself,

Is this going to help achieve my Goal?

What will be the impact of this task to my Goal?

Is it possible to delegate this work to someone or Am I the only one can do it?

Is it need to be done today or can be done tomorrow?

Make sure you take the consistency as a parameter before answering these questions. because if you intention is to lose weight but you are skipping workout, that doesn't help you to achieve your Goal.

After answering these questions, you will have a clarity on the tasks in your list and now you are good to prioritize them depends upon your need.

There is a way I used to follow. Think yourself as a third person and prioritize the tasks for a day. When prioritizing your tasks, do them if you are doing it for your close friend whom you want to achieve the goal. In this method, you will detach yourself with the emotions and only concentrate on what is important to achieve and what is not.  

Once you prioritize, always do the toughest but important task at first in the start of your day. If you can atleast complete the first 3 toughest and important tasks each day, you can congratulate yourself for your progress. You will be amazed when you see the results in long run. 

If you are reading this post till last, I hope you are really working towards yourself in the path of success and to add something of value, I would suggest you to read the book "Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time" by Brian Tracy (I am not paid but inspired by him 😊). 

I hope this post helps you to understand the importance of Time Management. Feel free to post you comments and take a look at the other posts in this series.