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Time Management Skills

Time Management Skills

Good time management skills is what allows you to be productive and make progress in different areas of your life, and still retain control over your stress and energy levels. Here is a discussion of the most important time management activities and skills to look at first.

Do you respect your priorities?

Prioritizing skills are among most wanted time management skills for jobs that involve handling many projects at the same time and coping with information overload.

We all have many things to do. How do you decide what to do first? A very common answer is to start from what is most urgent or from what feels most comfortable. This is what you often do automatically, if you don't learn to prioritize.

The truth is that the most important things are typically not urgent, and the urgent things are often not that important for your long-term success. Without solid prioritizing skills you rarely have time for what is most important, you are getting stuck where you are.

Always prepared for unplanned

In personal time management, ability to prioritize your activities is also crucial for your planning to work. You always face some unexpected events or unpredictable delays that leave less time to the planned activities than you initially planned.

The more clear priorities you have each day, the more prepared you are for such unpredictable situations. Instead of being totally kicked out of the planned way, you simply sacrifice a few of lower priority tasks, and you are still getting most out of your time. You know that you are prepared and you do your best.

Together with other time management skills, ability to prioritize is not something we are born with. Prioritizing and time management skills are learnt.

You hate planning?

Remember this wise quote, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." This is more than true when reaching ambitious long-term goals, like starting and running your own business or writing a book.

Then whose goals do you really serve?

How serious your planning is often determines how much control you have over your life. For example, the less planning you do for your career and work, the more likely your job will be only to strictly follow someone's instructions.

Planning should be fun

I can tell you that planning can be a pleasure. It should be, if you want it to stay in your life. You just need to find a planning style that best suits your personality, and use the right tools.

Are you able to say no?

With all good intentions of people around you, if they get a chance to put their own problems on your shoulders, they will do so.

Your ability to say no is an important component of your time management skills. It determines how much of your time will be wasted on solving someone else's problems. Problems that you are not supposed to and even don't want to solve. That does not mean you have to be too selfish. You just need to see the line between helping people and simply being used by them.

How easily you say no is a matter of your personality rather than knowledge of time management skills. In contrast to a common belief, ability to say no is not about being more aggressive and mean. Instead, it is about being assertive. Assertiveness skills may be a problem for some people, but fortunately, like time management skills, those life skills can be learnt. I would recommend to start from these free assertiveness lessons.

Important note

Here is just the right place to point at an important condition for good assertiveness and time management skills. What I mean is your self-confidence level. Self-confidence development is a little outside pure time management skills discussion. Yet, you can hardly overestimate its impact on your success in anything.

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