Some days I feel like a plate of scrambled eggs. All messed up and with the strange feeling that despite my best efforts nothing really got accomplished. I felt like time was not on my side at all. Despite working 14 hours a day I was making very little money and was exhausted.
I needed a change so I implement these five simple steps to give me more personal time:
1. Simplify Your Schedule
Things that can be done less or things that can be done once instead of twice are those things that will help us save a lot of time. Clean your house once every ten days instead of every 7 days ? you can do that, it?s normal and the house won?t get dirty in those three extra days. Make a work report every six week not every four weeks if possible. Keep meetings to inform yourself on ongoing projects twice a month not every week. And the list of things that can be done fewer times can go on forever.
2. Challenge yourself!
Watch the clock and settle to finish an activity by a certain hour. Focus, get rod of anything that could distract you and work more efficiently. Work to accomplish one thing at a time, and finish the project 100%.
3. Ask more out of 15 minutes.
Can you find 15 minutes a day that you could use more efficiently? Is there lost time in your activities? Or maybe a less important activity you can give up on? If you manage to save 15 minutes every day, you will win in fact 91 hours every year!
4. Do a list of little activities that don?t take you more than a couple of minutes.
Of course, we usually want to deal with the important problems first. But when we feel tired, stressed, in a bad mood, we find it hard to concentrate and we lose our time forcing ourselves. A list of simple activities will help you finalize something and push up your productivity. And obviously it is always better to know you did something, even is it is small, than to realize you haven?t even started anything. Sometimes even a small task done completely will set you sailing through the rest of your more complicated activities.
5. Make Large projects more time manageable.
On LARGE projects, it is better to tell yourself: ?I will work on this for 2 hours and see how much I can get done during this interval?. Focus and try to do all you can during that two hours. This is excellent advice to solve problems, and make progress on projects you avoided lately.
These are some simple steps that help me prioritize my day and get more done. I now have a more profitable day and spend more time with my family.
Bill McRea is the publisher of <a target="_new" href="http://time-management.24hour-info.com/">Learning Effective Time Management Skills</a> and <a target="_new" href="http://www.inside-yourself.com/">Living Inside Yourself</a>. Both sites are dedicate to providing useful information about life.
This article has been accessed 448 times since 2006-03-11.
Disclaimer: The information presented and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of ArticlePros.com and/or its partners.
