No Such Thing as Time Management

In the true spirit of January, I love to write about how to set the mood for the year.  Typical as people of a pampered society, we often lack discipline.  This is the primary reason people do not accomplish their goals.  With that said, I also am a firm believer that results keep us motivated and focused enough to stay the course when working on a new goal or task.

This means we have to learn to create small wins for ourselves on the way to a big win.  As well, we have to alter our rewards system in a way that doesn’t include damaging behavior, such as reversing our wins.  This is often seen with savings or weight loss goals.  You cannot reward your gym time with cake and you can’t reward your saving habits with new shoes…

So how can you help yourself reach a few more goals this year?  By managing your productivity.  This is different than managing your time.  I teach a time management course through C.O.D.E., our Center of Development and Excellence.  If you’ve ever taken my course, you would know that the title is misleading, because we actually discuss managing your productivity.  You can’t manage time.  Time keeps ticking regardless of what you are doing with it. You can manage your schedule.  You can manage your productivity.

3 tips for managing your productivity:

1. Use the 80/20 rule.  ALWAYS remember that 80% of your productivity will likely be based in 20% of your activities, so do these FIRST.
2. Believe it or not, but some people do not truly aspire to be more productive or set, much less reach any sort of goals.  I love these people.  They are busy people.  They love to be told what to do while they complain about it.  Put them to use!  Give them some of those busy tasks to get them off your plate and free you to focus on the most important tasks.
3. A huge time waster is partaking in tasks that occupy your time when they could have waited.  I can’t stress this enough. You do not have to answer every e-mail as soon as you receive it.  Block out time with your phone on DND. Pick one day to run errands and defer as many errands to that day as possible.  There are lots of ways to make better use of the time you have by leaving some tasks to sit a few hours.

There are many other habits you can form to make your year more productive.  Keep checking our blog as well as YouTube for more tips and of course, nothing beats our workshops where you can engage in learning some of these useful techniques and how to apply them in your life.

~JMJ