Mastering your time management

Mastering your time
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your time management.
Time is your most precious resource, all you have to trade for the things you want in life. Time is perishable; it cannot be saved. It can only be spent in different ways. Time is irreplaceable; nothing else will do, especially in relationships. Time is indispensable; all work requires an expenditure of time. Time is essential for accomplishment of all kinds.How are you using yours? Time management is a skill that can be learned with discipline and practice. Time management enables you to control the sequence of events. You are always free to choose what you do first, what you do second, and what you do not at all. Time management requires self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-control more than anything else. Time management is really personal management, life management, and management of yourself. Most people engage in activities that are tension releiving rather than goal achieving. Continually ask yourself if what you are doing is your highest ROTI- "Return on time invested." Your ability to manage your time for maximum results is the core skill of personal effectiveness. Time is the raw material of life. How are you processing yours? Don't complain of having to little time; you have all the time there is twenty four hours each day. High productivity comes from leveraging your time by doing only the most important things. Develop long-time perspective in your life; where do you want to be in five years? Your ability to delay gratification in the short-term will determine your financial success in the long-term. The value of anything can be determined by how much of your time you are willing to trade for it. All fortunes begin with the sale of personal service, the sale of personal time. The worst use of time is to do very well what need not be done at all. Doing what you really enjoy is the key to pick performance. "Whenever you find something getting done, you find a monomaniac with a mission." Happiness comes when you believe in what you are doing, know what you are doing, and love what you are doing. Is there anything in your life that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn't get into today? Practice creative abandonment with those activities that are no longer important to you. Keep asking: "what is the most valuable use of my time right now?" Time management is a vehicle to take you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. What are your core values in life? Are your goals and activities consistent with this values? What are your three most important goals in life right now? Are you allocating your time accordingly? How would you change your life, what would you do differently, if you want $1 million cash today? What would you do, how would you spend your time if you learned today that you only had twelve months to live? What are your dreams? What would you like to be, have, and do if you had no limitations? What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail? What is your personal mission? Are you living your life consistent with it? Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in your field. Learn something new everyday. Every action (or inaction) involves a choice between what is more important and what is less important. The law of the Excluded Alternative says that doing one thing means not doing something else. The Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule, says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results. What are your top 20 percent? Set both priorities and posteriorities on everything you do. What activities should you discontinue to free up more time for those activities that are truly important? The law of forced Efficiency says that there is always enough time to do the most important things. The key determinant of priorities should be the long-term potential consequences of an activity. What are the most important things you do, measured by their long-term consequences? What can you, and only you do, which, if done well, will make a real different? Your rewards will always be determined by your results; What results are expected of you? "Action without thinking ease the cause of every failure." In managing your time, your happiness should be your chief aim in life. To do more of one thing you must do less of something else. What should you be doing more of? Less of? Treat your time like money; how can you use best spend it to achieve maximum satisfactions? Set peace of mind as your highest goal and organize your time and life around it. Small improvements in the way you use your time can translate into major differences in your life. When you work, work all the time you work; put more of yourself into what you do. When you are with your family, be there 100 percent of the time-- emotionally as well as physically. To get more time with your family, limit and restrict television, newspapers, and outside activities. Spend unbroken chunks of time with the most important people in your life. It's quantity of time at home and quality of time at work that counts; don't mix them up! If successful people are both effective and efficient, they do the right things and they do them right. With excellent time management, you get more living out of life, more time for the people and things you enjoy. In developing excellent time management skills, focus on changing only one behavior at a time. No matter what you have done to this moment, you get 24 brand new hours to spend every single day. It doesn't matter where you're coming from; all that matters is where you're going. "Our great business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." Focus and concentration are the keys to high performance. Clear, specific goals are absolutely indispensable to success and achievement. What do you want in life? What do you really, really want? What are your highest value activities? Work on these exclusively. Why are you on the payroll? What specifically have you been hired to accomplish? What one skill, if you developed it and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on your life? Your rewards in life will be determined by what you do, how well you do it, and the difficulty of replacing you.