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| Time Management |
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| Beat work overload. Increase your effectiveness.
Achieve more. |
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This section of Mind Tools shows you how to use personal time management skills. These are some of the most important career skills that you can learn. Time Management skills are essential for successful people - these are the practical techniques which have helped the leading people in business, sport and public service reach the pinnacles of their careers.
The skills we explain help you become highly effective by showing you how to identify and focus on the activities that give you the greatest returns. Investing in these time management activities will actually save you time, helping you work smarter, not harder. The section finishes by explaining goal-setting, a vitally important skill for deciding what you want to achieve with your life. |
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| • Time Management Skills - Making the most of your time utilization |
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This section discusses personal time management skills. These are essential skills for effective people. People who use these techniques routinely are the highest achievers in all walks of life, from business to sport to public service. If you use these skills well, then you will be able to function effectively, even under intense pressure. At the heart of time management is an important shift in focus:
| Concentrate on results, not on being busy |
Many people spend their days in a frenzy of activity, but achieve very little because they are not concentrating on the right things. |
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| • The 80:20 Rule |
This is neatly summed up in the Pareto Principle, or the '80:20 Rule'. This argues that typically 80% of unfocussed effort generates only 20% of results. The remaining 80% of results are achieved with only 20% of the effort. While the ratio is not always 80:20, this broad pattern of a small proportion of activity generating non-scalar returns recurs so frequently as to be the norm in many areas.
By applying the skills in this chapter you can optimize your effort to ensure that you concentrate as much of your time and energy as possible on the high payoff tasks. This ensures that you achieve the greatest benefit possible with the limited amount of time available to you. |
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| • Time Management Tools |
| The tools we will discuss are: |
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Finding out how much your time is worth - Costing Your Time. |
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Making sure you concentrate on the right things - Deciding Work Priorities. |
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Checking how you really spend your time - Activity Logs. |
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Planning to solve a problem - Action Plans. |
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Tackling the right tasks first - Prioritized To Do Lists. |
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Deciding what your personal priorities should be - Personal Goal Setting. |
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Planning to make the best use of your time - Effective Scheduling |
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Time management products reviewed - Reviews |
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By the end of this section, you should have a much clearer understanding of how to use time to its greatest effect. These tools and many, many more are explained in Mind Tools' Make Time For Success! This contains more than 100 pages of time tested tips, techniques and secrets to improve your time management skills and get the most that life has to offer. You will learn how to set realistic goals, generate a life plan and leverage all of the opportunities that life has to offer. Many of the lessons include workbook exercises so that you really understand how to put these invaluable skills to work in your life. In the first of these time management articles, we look at costing your time, an important reality check which helps you avoid wasting time on trivial tasks. To read this, click 'Next article' below. Other relevant destinations are shown in the "Where to go from here" list underneath.
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| • Costing Your Time - Finding Out How Much Your Time is Worth |
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| • How to Use Tool |
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The first part of your focus on results should be to work out how much your time costs. This helps you to see if you are spending your time profitably. If you work for an organization, calculate how much you cost it each year. Include your salary, payroll taxes, the cost of office space you occupy, equipment and facilities you use, expenses, administrative support, etc. If you are self-employed, work the annual running costs of your business. To this figure add a 'guesstimate' of the amount of profit you should generate by your activity.
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If you work normal hours, you will have something like 200 productive days each year. If you work 7½ hours each day, this equates to 1,500 hours in a year. From these figures, calculate an hourly rate. This should give a reasonable estimate of how much your time is worth - this may be a surprisingly large amount! When you are deciding whether or not to take a task on, think about this value - are you wasting your or your organization's resources on a low yield task? |
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| • Key points |
Calculating how much your time is worth helps you to work out how whether it is worth doing particular jobs. If you have to spend much of your time doing low-yield jobs, then you can make a good case for employing an assistant. This is just one of the tools explained in Mind Tools 'Make Time For Success! This book takes you step by step through an easy to follow process that will teach you how to work smarter and not harder.
In the next article we look at deciding work priorities, important if you're going to focus on what's important and cut away distractions. To read this, click 'Next article' below. Other relevant destinations are shown in the "Where to go from here" list underneath. |
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