Posts Tagged ‘to-do lists’

Warning: Use These Time Management Tools At Your Own Risk

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

This is an interesting post about how the tools we use to help make our lives much easier

Time management matrix as described in Merrill...
time management matrix

can sometimes add to the frustration and work load in our lives if we don’t use the tools correctly.  Time management is no exception to this rule.  There are many powerful time management tools out there than can really help effectively manage our time, but they can also drive us down the rabbit hole as well if we are not careful.  Read on for more about how time management tools can wast our  time if not used effectively.

Are you managing your time efficiently? Or do you often find out that the time lost in working on your time management is more than the time saved from it? This is by far the biggest risk, along with losing money on bad tools or bad time management training.

Remember:

The point of time management is to improve the way you use your time, free up your brain from unimportant tasks, and free you up from stress. If instead of this your efforts to manage time end up in less time for you and more stress, you are obviously on the wrong way.

Tools and software can help you a lot to control your time better. Instead of having to remember activities and techniques, time management tools help you automate them. But… sometimes there is a risk. Let’s explore three major types of tools and the risks associated with them:

Low Risk: Calendars
Calendars help you organize your events, meetings, dates, important milestones and other duties. They help you not to miss your visit at the dentist and can remind your friends to come at the party tomorrow. Many calendars are free and have nice features like email reminders, sending iCal invites and so on. Calendars are very useful time management tools and you should use them. But use them properly, because otherwise they can get you in trouble too.

The main risk with calendars is to rely too much on yours. If you expect your calendar to know your appointments better than you (which is it’s purpose anyway), what happens when it doesn’t work well? What happens for example if you rely on receiving email reminder about an appointment but exactly this time the email arrives in your spam box? Such events are rare and that’s what makes them so unexpected.

You should never rely 100% on technologies. If an event is important for you, insert it in 2 or 3 calendars, put it in your phone alarm, use the good old method with paper and fridge magnet.

Medium Risk: To do lists
To do lists are neat little apps that let you create projects, assign tasks to them, reorder them, and mark them done when done. While bloody simple, these apps are very useful for time management. They help you not forget the tasks you have. They help you write your ideas as tasks in very simple way. They help you watch how you accomplish a project. Very nice!

What’s so risky about them? Just think a little. What happens with the tasks that you forget to write in the list? I’ll tell you. They never get done.
Then what happens with the not-so-easy tasks? I’ll tell you. They never get done, because you always move them after the others and if by any chance they remain the last in the list, you come up with new ideas and new tasks.

And finally, when your to-do list becomes too large, it causes the decision block. How to order the tasks, which ones to do first? When you have a long task list you can easily feel depressed and lose your motivation.

But don’t get me wrong, to do lists are great tools when used right…

High Risk: Time management charts
Time management charts are supposed to help you visualize how you spend your time, figure out the time wasters, and figure out which activities you do in your most productive time. They can be extremely powerful in giving long term results by helping you organize your daily routines and productive time better.

They can also lead to extreme time waste if not used correctly. Imagine what happens if you underestimate the importance of proper tracking and enter values in the chart “as you feel them”. Generally you will decrease the time spend to time wasters (think checking your Facebook account), because you don’t feel them as wasters. At the end the time management chart will show totally misleading information.

Another even more common risk is just to spend too much time maintaining your time management chart and then get no useful results. You don’t need another addiction – if you can get useful results from using time management charts in a couple of weeks, drop using them for good.

Don’t forget that time management tools are created to help you and they will, if you use them well. And if you combine them with the best time management activities you will be the master of your time!

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Time Management Strategies for Getting Organized

Friday, September 28th, 2007

This is a good article for giving people great strategies for managing their time. If you want to build additional time into your schedule, these tips are a great way to make your time much more efficient.

Do you constantly find yourself running out of time? Do you get everything done that you want to each day or do you find yourself with more activities then you are able to handle? If you can relate to these problems then you need some time management strategies for getting organized.

Know what you want

Before implementing any other time management strategies for getting organized you need to know what you want. If you have no goals and do not know what you actually want to achieve with the time you have been given then you will find yourself saying “yes” to everything, even where you should be saying “no”. Knowing what you want to achieve keeps you disciplined in your time management.

Write down your Goals

In order to implement time management strategies you need to know what you want, but even people who know what they want do not always manage their time effectively. Strategies for getting organized also include writing down those goals. Take some time to write down what you want to achieve in life. What is it that you want people to say about you when you reach the end of your life? What dreams do you want to fulfill? Write them down and then set goals which say when you want to have achieved them by and how you are going to go about achieving them.

Prioritize

What are your priorities? When implementing time management strategies for getting organized you are going to need to think carefully about what is most important to you. Many possible activities will come your way each and every day and if you do not know what your priorities are then you may find yourself doing all the trivial things rather than those things that are really important for achieving your goals. Priorities should be worked out regularly with the help of a to-do list.

Create a To-Do List

Goals are extremely important in effective time management strategies but they can also be long term and if you do not have other strategies for getting organized then you may not accomplish those goals. Create a to-do list regularly and order it in terms of your priorities. Then you will have a workable plan for achieving your goals and can systematically work through your to-do list, accomplishing those things that are most important to you.

Categorize your activities

When looking at all the activities which occupy your day try to break them down into a number of categories. This categorization needs to be done on two levels. Firstly work out what activities you need to do, what activities you can delegate to others, and what activities are actually not important to be done at all. Delegate those activities that can be delegated, cut out the unimportant activities and then re-categorize the activities that only you can do and that are important for you to do. You may want to categorize this list into categories such as work, family, social, physical (health), spiritual, etc.

Use a Weekly Planner

Once you have categorized your activities the last of our time management strategies for getting organized is to use a weekly planner. Block out times on your weekly planner when you can do those activities that you need to and that you categorized above. Use different colors for different activity categories. Take time regularly to fill in your weekly planner and then review it daily to ensure that you do not miss any important events and that you stick to your goals.

Don’t Procrastinate

One of the worst enemies of effective time management is procrastination. It is important that you start implementing these time management strategies for getting organized today. If you wait until tomorrow, you may never put them into practice so start today.

In conclusion, effective time management begins with strategies for getting organized such as knowing what you want, writing down your goals, prioritizing your to-do list, categorizing your activities and using a weekly planner. These time management strategies should be implemented regularly and begun immediately to ensure that you reach your goals and accomplish all that you want to with your life.
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[tags]goals, to do lists, planning, time management[/tags]

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