Time Management Tips

Time is money, we all agree that time is valuable as money, and even more. If we lose a minute we will never be able to recover it at all, where as people lose millions of dollars and make them back and even more. 


Listed below some very useful tips on time management: 


1. Make a master schedule.  Include your weekly meetings, classes, or activities that do not vary.  Try to consolidate or group activities to preserve unscheduled chunks of usable time.  If you have trouble making this schedule, you are probably trying to do too much.  Once you make it, consult it and use it to structure your daily activities. Do not schedule every moment.
2. Be selective about what you commit to.  Better to say “no” right away than to fail to follow through.
3. Keep promises. Once you say you will do something or be somewhere, make sure you do it unless you get hit by a truck.
4. Fail serially.  Everyone runs out of time. Rotate the problem of under-preparation among all your tasks, so that you do not slight the same thing over and over, and generally you operate at a high level.
5. Eat well, sleep well, exercise, and goof off.  Apply rule #4 if you can’t do all four every day, but keeping your body in shape and your spirits up makes possible the concentration and energy you need to accomplish things.
6. Enjoy what you do.  Choose activities you like.  If you are stuck doing something you don’t like, find the thing about it you can enjoy (co-workers, friends, the weather, beating the clock, etc.)  See #2 for the future.
7. Plan ahead. Begin working to meet a deadline at a reasonable moment (Don’t start writing the paper or presentation at 10:00 pm for an 8:00 am class or meeting).  By visualizing an activity in advance you can note what will be necessary to make it happen and take appropriate steps.
8. Recognize excellence. Delegate to the able, if you are in a position to.  Help others often.  Ask for help seldom. But know who are the people “in the know” in every situation.  That way when you are really in a pinch, you know who to turn to, and you can solve a problem quickly.
9. Collaborate with those who disagree with you.  We learn from criticism.  By dealing positively with critics we also avoid drawing passive aggressive behavior that creates obstacles to slow us down.
10.   Forgive yourself.  We all fail at some point or get derailed by the unexpected.  Learn from it.  Fix what you can.  Apologize when you need to, and then move on.