My Time Management = My Life Management

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days....it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”              

Annie Dillard

In our consulting, it is very rare for people to come up to me and say, "Hey, I have got plenty of time and not much to do." In our experience, so many people feel stressed and under constant time pressure, dogged by their many commitments and hampered in achieving them.

As a result, people often work harder and longer, often at the expense of spending time with family and friends, often at the expense of their health and well-being.

My purpose in providing this website is to offer a range of strategies to work smarter. To manage time, lead a life of value, and experience the satisfaction of achievement and pride in your accomplishments.

So if you, like so many of us, feel you have inadvertently joined the new generation of techno-slaves, welcome! Or if you just want to get the very best out of your days, welcome!

Does this sound familiar?

  • Spending 2-3  hours and more reading and responding to emails,
  • Trying daily to manage up to 20 trivial low-value interruptions,
  • Responding to seemingly urgent requests,
  • Attending too many unproductive meetings, 
  • Spending up to 45 minutes a day looking for stuff you've lost somewhere in a file,
  • Multiple handling your email, tasks, and documents,
  • Procrastinating on your big-ticket items,
  • Waking up at night worrying about the things you haven't done,
  • Losing sight of your long-term personal ambitions,
  • Concerned that your relationships need more time and care.
 

Where should you start your time management journey?

In my experience, time management consists of three elements

  1. Efficiency. Efficiency is like climbing a ladder quickly. As such, efficiency is about doing things right and doing them quickly.
  2. Effectiveness. Effectiveness is asking the question of whether the ladder is leaning up against the right building. So effectiveness is whether I spend my time on the highest investment return. 
  3. and the habits and routine to regularly implement. 

Performance is a balance between efficiency and effectiveness, and by tweaking work habits in little ways, you can dramatically increase the quality of your life.

In my experience, effectiveness is more important than efficiency.

It is more important to ensure you are spending your time on the highest-impact activities rather than worrying about whether you have a clean Inbox or your files are all named correctly.

However, it is challenging to deal with effectiveness from an implementation viewpoint if we haven’t sorted out efficiency.

So what tactics to choose when wanting to improve time management….. your tactics can be found below.

Start where you feel the pain the most. Then, each strategy you apply will strengthen your resolve to go further and build a habit of progress rather than perfection.

“You cannot start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.” 

Michael McMillan

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