An Instant Guide to Time Management

1. Your life is only time – your time is your life. It’s precious – you only get it once.
   In order to manage your time successfully you’ll need to be assertive and self-disciplined. All time problems come either from other people or yourself. Both assertiveness and self discipline can
2. be greatly increased by having clear goals in your life.
3. Make a list of your personal and work goals. What do you like doing, that you would like to do more of? What do you want to achieve? Aim high. Make your goals clear and detailed so that you
4. can see them in your head. Now you know what’s important – anything that contributes to your goals.
5. Material things will not make you happy. To do and to be are more important than to have.
6. Aim to enjoy the present and achieve in the future. The past is gone and cannot be changed. Learn from it, but don’t live in it.
7. Good time management will require you to overcome your Be Perfect, Hurry Up, or Please Others drivers – if you have any of these.
8. Make a master list of everything you’ve got to do. This will come from your goals (the tasks required in order to get there) as well as being things you’ve just got to do. Don’t worry yet about when
9. you’ll do them, just put everything on the list. This is your raw material for planning – the first step towards taking control of your time, and therefore your life.
10. Allocate time every day to important but non-urgent tasks: planning ahead and doing things before they become urgent. All your results will come from this.
11. Every time you decide to do something you effectively decide to NOT do everything else in the world. Are you sure that the thing you have decided to do is the best use of your time?
12. Find a way to beat procrastination that works for you. Procrastination only affects important non-urgent tasks, which are the most vital ones! It’s also a big contributor to stress. Good time
13. management will give you a feeling of control and progress and will greatly reduce your level of stress.
14. If faced with a crisis ask why it has been able to happen and fix the underlying cause. Every crisis has an underlying cause. Most crises have happened before – don’t let them happen again.
15. Have a jobs to do list every day. Not more than ten things, ideally only about five. This will focus you and you’ll get much more done. If there are no urgent tasks to put on it then you can put on
16. some getting-ahead tasks: even better.
17. Be assertive about interruptions and bad meetings. It’s YOUR life that’s being wasted. Assertiveness = courage + honesty. Have a no-crap policy in your life.
18. Saying no is vital – if you don’t, your life will gradually fill up with things you don’t want to do. Every time you let something new into your life something else must get squeezed out – and it might
19. be something important. Don’t feel guilty about saying no.
20. An alternative to saying no can be to negotiate – you can offer to do it later, spend less time on it, only do part of it, get help with it, etc.
21. Write everything down – either on your master list (I’ll do it some time), your daily list (I’ll do it today) or your diary (I’ll do it on Thursday). If someone promises they’ll do something for you, ask
22. when and write the date in your diary. If you promise them something, write the first step in your diary. Diaries can be paper-based or personal organiser – whatever works for you. But they
23. should cover both home and work in one, and be small enough to always have with you. Never fill the days or weeks completely – allow space for urgent things that will crop up.

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