EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT

Time is a gift given to all men in same proportion to achieve what they desire. Yet some achieve a whole lot than others who achieve less. One good reason for this is lack of effective time management.

Time Management is the act of taking charge of your time. Which involves organizing, planning and efficiently sharing our time among specific activities. Good time managements enable us to channel our energy to the right things at the right time there enabling us to live better, smarter, result driven lives and makes us so that we can get more done quicker in spite of limited time and accompanying pressure from around us. Failing to manage our time may affect our effectiveness and cause undue stress. It may seem counter-intuitive to dedicate our precious time to learning about time management, instead of using it to get on with our work, but the benefits are enormous

So how can we effectively manage our time? We can do this by adopting the initiatives below:

1)      Prioritize: Build a daily to do list in the right order and adhere strictly to it. This helps to let you know what you want to do and how to do it. In building this list consider divide task into four quadrants as stated below:

Urgent & Important	Important but not Urgent
Not Urgent but Important	Not Important and Not Urgent

    2)    Avoid Time wastage: Everyone is gifted with the same unit of time, 24 hours, from which we are to allocate these units to our daily task but there exist some duties we engage in that constitute time wastage; eating up our time and reduces our productivity. A good example is flipping through our phones aimlessly or just sitting before the TV and shuttling between channels.  These hardly add any value to our lives. Some other examples are people around who “have nothing to do but have all the time in the world to do it”

   3)   Create “time management goals” Always remember that the focus of time management is actually changing our behavior not changing time. This means having the best attitude and disposition to eliminate waste and redundancies. For instance, we can challenge ourselves to set a goal of not taking personal calls (except it’s very important) or getting entangled with social media while on a task and see how much time will be saving daily. 

  4)  Avoid Procrastination: Putting off task for a later date with the notion or belief that it will get easier later. This usually happens due to fear of failure (or even success) by believing that we cannot do things perfectly. Indecisive and disorganized people tend to procrastinate. For effective time management, we should teach our team members and colleagues the danger of procrastinating and why they should not even think of it while getting the job done. In summary, procrastination causes undue time wasting and also lower.

   Failing to manage our time effectively can have some very undesirable results:

  Missed deadlines.

  Inefficient work flow.

  Poor work quality.

  A poor professional reputation and a stalled career.

  Higher stress levels.