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Home | Self Improvement | Time Management One of the biggest time management goofs of all time is to prioritize by importance or urgency. Another disaster area of time management training is to schedule your activities to time. And the third major mistake people try to manage time with is the traditional weekly to-do list. Prioritizing by importance has been a common sense time management technique taught for years. So telling you that it is a bad technique might raise some red flags. That's ok. I know I'm right. And you will discover your own solution by understanding this article. Time flies so fast doesn't it? Deadlines. Scarce resources. Overwhelming chores. And other people who take up way too much of your precious time. Today's time management system must incorporate your working life with your personal life. Your hobbies and social activities must be tied in with your career development. This is the modern era of efficient organized lifestyles after all. Weekends are a great time to catch up o life's basic necessities. Because the week is so hectic. But imagine a handful of chores including cooking, filing in some documents, getting the pet to the vet, mowing the grass. The chores easily stack up. How can you really prioritize it all? Here's a question for you: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by degree of importance? If you only have a few things to do, then it works a charm. But if life was so smooth you wouldn't be reading an article on time management would you?! So you end up neglecting certain areas of life because prioritizing only works so far. One major question is making the choice between multiple options. If you organized everything by level of importance you will end up rushing around putting out fires because you neglected things until they were practically emergencies, such as cutting the grass (forest!) or exercising, or organizing the files on your computer. You could try combining importance with urgency. On Saturday afternoon you want to take your daughter to her tutor, get your hair cut, read through the office paperwork you've brought home with you because there wasn't enough time at work last week. Now, you realize it will be hard to fit all those things in. So you decide to not get your hair cut again this weekend. Until your wife nags at you for having long scruffy hair it's not urgent is it. How can you actually prioritize between all those things so tasks are not left until they are negatively impacting the quality of your life? That office memo is majorly important. But the tuition appointment is urgent because it starts in an hour. So the office memo has Priority Importance level A. But your daughters tuition has importance B but urgency A. Now that your wife has made fun of your long hair it gets adjusted from priority C to priority A. The office memo can be done Sunday evening so that's actually priority B. But taking the wife shopping is a priority A as she's nagging that you didn't have time to go food shopping last week and she can't carry it all her self. Along comes Saturday afternoon, and Sally's tutorship now gets crossed off the B list and put on the A list because it's Saturday, and you've got Memo and Sally's Tutorship on the A list. The ABCDE method of prioritizing by importance creates a lot of difficulty. Even with just those handful of tasks to account for. When life is far more varied and complex. And you know the mess experienced with time management when everything is put into the mix. Trying to prioritize by importance and urgency is, as I hope you'll agree, next to impossible, and highly impractical. It doesn't work for time management now because modern lifestyles are faster paced and more integrated. That is, you can do more things in the same locations. And the borders of the work place, and working at home have blurred. You need to find an alternative to the normal same old same old time management techniques that they're trying to force feed you with today. Your time is the most precious commodity you have got. Mind how you use it and which time management systems you live by. Article Source: http://www.articlewheel.com
Real time management solutions are available from Nathan T Shaw in his time management system.
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