STORYTIME TAPESTRY

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Special Treat ??“ From Me!

Jan 30, 2006

Effective Time Management Techniques

Carol Roach

A few of my friends have asked me how could they manage their time more efficiently therefore the reason for this post.

The key in time management for the novice is to first create the list - Schedules are really important and they help us to organize our thoughts as well as our activities. Please don't be vain and think you will remember everything you have to do, chances are you won't. That one thing you forgot out of the myriad of things that had to be done may have been one of the most important. Isn't it funny how the mind works?

Now that you are going to create your list you must organize it.

Step one

On that list you will have the important to do's that must be done, and then the extras if you have time. It is important to have the ???if I have time??? as a second column. The last thing you want to do is fail to do something important because you wasted your time on other things.

Of course there are reasons for wasting time. Maybe you really didn??™t want to do the important thing in the first place, but that is a character flaw not an asset and you need to work on that.

I will share examples from my own life, when I didn??™t feel like cracking down on my studying the excuses came up.

Example number one: I had to walk the dog.

Sure I did, but not at the very minute when I had just walked him an hour before.

Example number two:

I had to call a friend.

The conversation was not all that important and I could have waited until after studying or even the following day.

My point here is to illustrate how these extra things were really excuses to not get the important things done.

To recap, your list has your important things that have to be done with a separate column that clearly list the optional.

If one of your problem areas is that there is not enough hours in a day to get through what must be done, look and see exactly what is truly optional; not necessary, or could be deferred to another day.

Step two

List your activities in a chronological order and include a column for the time requirement involved to facilitate each task.

For example Activity and Time required

Eat breakfast 7:00 am ??“ 7:20 am (taking into account the time it takes to prepare it)

As you go down your list for the day other activities could be to take a shower, go to school, eat lunch, go back to school, eat supper, go to work, come home, study for an exam, walk the dog meditate, prepare lunch for following day, and set out clothes for next day.

A very vital consideration is how long should it take you to do all these things?

If you decided to allow 30 minutes for a shower, you need to add on an extra 10 minutes just in case when you had your shower and you are looking for the brush for your hair, your child did not hid it on you and then you have to run around the house looking for it.

The key is not to be so rigid that every second must be adhered to as if you are running a marathon and you are in the winning stretch. You must allow for the unexpected. Things can and do go wrong. Many times situations don??™t go as planned. We must allow ourselves time for that. By adopting this philosophy you may very well have time to get to the optional activities on your list and at the very least, you will be less frustrated and less inclined to blame yourself for situations that may very well have been out of your control to begin with.

Step three:

Review your list; is everything there or did you forget something?

It was an impressive list wasn't it? In the example list I provided. But I see something missing.

How were you getting from one place to another? How were you getting from home to school to work to home? Did this all happen in a blink of an eye? Of course not it took time. One of the biggest reasons people do not get through everything needed to be done on their list during the course of the day is that they add too many activities, forgetting that each activity requires extraneous time.

You have to factor in that time. For example it may take 45 minutes to get from home to school, and an additional 45 minutes from school to work, etc. You need also to allow time for possible bus delays, traffic jams etc. Your 45 minute trip should now look more like an hour just to be on the safe side.

Another good example for time management is the issue of supper. Will you be ready exactly at the time you planned to eat or are you going to have to wait on your friend who is constantly late?

Do you know exactly where you are going, or are you going to argue for 15 minutes with a group of friends about where the best place to eat would be. These seemingly mundane issues are in fact important elements in time management.

A final issue to bring up from my example list of daily activities is the time required for homework. If you guessed it should take you 3 hours to write that paper, better guess again. Add an addition hour or two. Very rarely do we as humans guess the exact time it should take to do an activity especially something like homework. Of course if you are conducting a lecture and know that regardless of where you are at in your speech it must end at a pre designated time then it will be so. However, most activities in life are not that cut and dry.

Back to your paper, many things can go wrong. For example: the words would not come, there were too many distractions in the house like tending to a crying baby, the power went out, you had computer problems, you didn??™t have the right material in front of you and had to run back to the library to get what you needed, you thought you could complete the assignment in three hours and even though there was no distractions and you were tenacious, you needed to take a breather, to rejuvenate and finally the assignment itself just could not be done in three hours.

Being organized and allowing ourselves the time needed to go through our activities with a relative degree of ease, help us become more productive and efficient in the end.

Carol Roach

winterose@videotron.ca

A Native of Montreal, Quebec, Carol is a graduate of Concordia, and McGill University. She holds a bachelor in psychology and a Masters in counselling psychology. Carol Roach is a published writer and newsletter editor. You can purchase her book: Picking up the Pieces: A Woman's Journey at www.publishamerica.com, or www.amazon.com. You can also go to your local bookstore and order it there as well. Carol??™s second book: Angels Watching Over is currently looking for a home. Stay tuned for details.

If you are interested in other stories feel free to join her newsletter: Storytime Tapestry at: http://subs.zinester.com/98907 , or email her directly at winterose@videotron.ca and she will be glad to accommodate you. Carol enjoys email and responds to every inquiry.