Five Techniques To Manage Your Time

“He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out the plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.”

Victor Hugo (1802 ~ 1885)

If I asked you what is most lacking in your days, would your answer be time? Would you say that there just don’t seem to be enough time in the day or in any week, to do the things you want to or should do? But time hasn’t decreased, has it? It has remained constant – the same twenty-four hours in every day. Man has learnt to harness and manage many things over the centuries. Yet, we have not mastered the management of time.

Is it really that difficult? You can learn to manage your time more efficiently by learning how to manage the tasks that make up our days. And therein is the secret. Actually, it is not a secret at all. So today, we’ll look at tried and tested ways to use our God-given time.

Chances are that in any one day, there will be routine tasks that you do. The left over time is usually filled by occasional duties like weekly or monthly commitments. The drudgery of some of these daily chores often renders us robotic in our movements and we just go through them in a daze without a plan, a thought or an eye to efficiency. We just want to get them done. However, those unavoidable routine tasks can be managed in a way to make them less burdensome and time-consuming.

Schedule Time Limits

Schedule routine household and personal tasks just as you would work-related ones. Use a notebook, diary or appointment book. This practice will block the amount of time you devote to a particular activity. When the time is up for each task simply stop and move on to the next.

For this to work though, you must have a fairly accurate idea of how long tasks will take to complete.

Stay Organized

The whole system will go haywire if every activity is preceded by half an hour spent hunting down the necessary materials and tools. That is a waste of time.

Ideally, tools and supplies for a particular task should be stored close to the activity centre. Most of us attest to less-than-adequate storage in our homes, but that’s no excuse for having things scattered, cluttered and missing when we need them.