Invest Your Time Wisely

Category: Opinion
Published: September 2006

Learn how to make the best use of your time for business, home and pleasure.

There are too many people who don't know where they are going and are in too much of a hurry to get there. Have you ever noticed how everyone is in a rush these days? Always running here to a meeting, late for their son's football game, missed their daughter's Tae Kwan Do brown belt test, and they forgot to pick up the milk on the way home. When you walk into your office and you see a stack of incoming mail, four reports due by noon, checks that must go out by end of month and you haven't checked your incoming email for changes to today's meeting. Oh and by the way the Rupert bid was due yesterday or you lost it. What do you do? No, you can't just throw it all up in the air and go golfing. You have to attack it with a vengeance, and then go golfing.

Time is our most precious commodity. Once we spend it we can never get it back. Therefore how we make use of our time is the most critical thing that we can do.

How we plan to maximize our time will allow us to create and manage the life that we dream of. We cannot waste one moment.

Time management is a critical tool that provides us with a means to Success. There are many aspects to achieving a quality life that starts with the following:

• Prepare a list of your goals and objectives, things to do, financial and business.
• At first glance this seems like a tremendous task, but if you don't write it down it will not happen. Oh yes I know that you are a genius, but just play along. Be specific in what has to be accomplished. Separate business, personal and financial goals initially then we will combine them later into a unified plan.
• Prioritize your goals and objectives
• Create a plan to implement your goals and objectives. Set a specific date and time as to when you will complete your goals and objective and the method to do so.
• Implement your plan with perseverance
• Remove the refuse that wastes time: excessive email, junk mail, wannabes
• Learn to delegate tasks to subordinates
• Learn to say NO. You can't please everyone. Don't waste time with superfluous nonsense.
• Stop procrastination and it starts at the top. If we procrastinate then all who work with us or for us will procrastinate.
• Reduce meeting time. If we better prepare for our meetings and keep them short and to the point, then we can reduce 20% of our waste daily.
• Set aside phone time. If we set aside a maximum of 15 minutes 4 times a day for phone calls, then we would cut down the superfluous calls that meander on forever with no point to the conversation. (Except when the boss calls to tell you to bring home a gallon of milk.)