creating sustainable results in growth and performance

People short of time tend to find themselves majoring in minor things. They find themselves spending all of their time on little things that will not have any bearing on accomplishing goals. In planning your time, use the 80-20 rule—that 80% of the results will be due to 20% of your activities.

(Note: for most of us, the 80/20 rule in reality works as a 70/30 rule - namely 70% of your results will be due to 30% of your activities.)

Most of us feel that we never have enough time. We can create time by realistically scheduling those tasks that need to be done. Oftentimes, we assign unrealistic time frames to what needs to be done and find ourselves overwhelmed and under accomplished. We are left wondering where the time has gone and why we have not succeeded in what we were working on.

We lose valuable time and motivation when we spend too much time on low priority items. That is not to say that small tasks do not lead to larger accomplishments. But we need to be aware of whether we are spending large amounts of time on lower priority tasks that drain the amount of time and energy left for tasks that will assure us of achieving our goals.

Another time management concern is whether or not we are able to make basic decisions about what we want to do with our time. Our lives are a result of the infinite number of decisions we have made. These decisions have either seemed small and insignificant or incredibility large and important. Regardless, they have all worked together to bring us to where we are today.

If you are happy and feeling productive in relation to your goals and expectations, you are making appropriate decisions about your life. On the other hand, if you find yourself unhappy, frustrated, and feeling stressful or anxious most of the time, that indicates a need to learn how to more effectively make decisions so that you use time wisely.

Several clues indicate that you are making poor choices about time management. One is feeling tired all the time. Another is having periods of time where you are doing very little in relation to your goals. You often need to take time away from your goals to reflect and refresh yourself; but you do not need to remove yourself for large periods of time so that you are overwhelmed by the amount of time it will take to complete the tasks when you return.

In general, when you are not making good decisions about the use of time, you feel overwhelmed and as if you never have time for yourself. You are not being as productive working towards your goals as you would like to be and you feel that whatever you are doing is simply not worth it.

When you are making ineffective time management choices, you don’t have time for the rest of your life and will find it out of balance. You don’t get the proper amount of rest nor have time for leisure activities and important people.

You will also find yourself missing deadlines and time frames that you have set. You might miss the deadline for a presentation, forget to have the agenda prepared for a board meeting on Friday, or actually forget an appointment that you "inadvertently" overlooked adding to your diary..

If you are experiencing some of these situations, here are suggestions for improvement:

You can increase your awareness of blocks of time and what can be appropriately accomplished within them; then learn how to match tasks to that unit of time.

You can build time into your schedule to handle the unexpected. We will all have interruptions— traffic, the weather not cooperating, or a meeting cancelled or changed or an appointment overrunning.

You can learn to do two things at once, learn to delegate, get up earlier, change your TV watching habits, or rearrange your days.

You can also identify time wasters that interfere with good time management. These time wasters usually fall within one of two categories.

In the first category, you spend the majority of your time doing low priority activities rather than doing the high priority activities needed for completion of your goal.

In the second category, you spend the majority of your time doing things that have absolutely no relevance to the goal that you are trying to accomplish. For example, you may decide that this is the time to clean out your desk rather than work on a report that is due at the end of the day. Time wasters have you post- poning or avoiding activities that need to be done for goal completion.

Perhaps – most important - you can learn to say no.

An excellent book is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Your Time. It provides the complete range of thinking-in-the-box suggestions including

	quick and easy guidance for getting the most out of every minute at home and at work
	idiot-proof steps for prioritizing and organizing
	down-to-earth advice on handling work overload

All of these will work. They will work well - for a while. When you have tried all of these, and are still despairing of getting enough time for what you really want, work with FutureVisions!
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