Time Management

In order to maximize the amount of time that you have available, you have to make a plan . The best way to plan is to set goals. If you regularly set goals, you can decide on what and why you want to achieve them. Setting goals will help you plan your days, weeks and ultimately your life.

Remember if you fail to plan you plan to fail.

Think about big events, a wedding perhaps? You decide upon your goal; To get married on a specific date. You then work backwards from that date to plan what is needed to achieve that goal. You write a list of invitees. You arrange the venue. You plan the service. Etc etc. So you can see goal setting really does work. By knowing exactly what you want to achieve you’ll know what you have to focus on to do it.

Goal setting is used by top business people, athletes and high achievers in all walks of life. Goals provide a long term focus and short term targets, helping you to prioritise tasks and organize your time.

At home, we even have a to-do list for our weekends: You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve when you actually plan your time. We have friends that ask, “How did you fit all that in?” The answer is simple, “we planned to”.

Goals should cover a number of areas

Financial/Wealth

Spiritual/Family

Education

Career

Physical/Health

Material/Things

Goals should start with the lifetime goals, say a 20 year set of goals that you want to complete in your life, then set 5 year, 1 year, 6 month and 1 monthly goal plans, each time getting the goals getting smaller to enable them to be achievable. Then of course, you can make you daily do list that focuses on you goals. That way you’ll stay motivated to complete them.

If you’re married or living with a partner, make sure that you share the goals and plans, otherwise they could be in for a shock.

When we went though this exercise with a group of sales staff for a flooring company, the reaction from one of the team was “I can’t share this with my wife, she’ll divorce me”. Interesting! My reaction was “when would you like her to find out?” he sat down thinking.

Goals should be precise, measurable, positive, realistic but not to easy. For example “By the 30 May 2006 I will weigh 160Lbs (about 11st 6lbs)” this is measurable, certainly it’s precise. It’s positive and if you’re 170Lbs at the moment it’s probably realistic, but not that easy.

However if you wrote “I need to loose weight this year”, then is isn’t measurable, it’s not very positive, it’s certainly not precise, and I guess you could argue that it’s achievable if only for a day.

When you’ve written your goals, don’t put them away in a drawer; keep them with you updating them if necessary to reflect changes in your ideas

When you achieve a goal celebrate. Celebrate and tell everybody. Celebration makes you feel good and installs positive anchors in your mind to help you achieve the next goal.

Take a look at this web site it’s a fantastic resource for time management, goal setting and all aspects of personal planning.

www.mindtools.com