Réussir, c’est d’abord se faire aimer des
autres.
(Jean-Paul BOURRE)
Managing Your Time
Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have
today is “time poverty.”
Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal
lives. Most
people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder
they
work, the further behind they feel. This sense of being on a never-ending
treadmill
can cause you to fall into the reactive/responsive mode of living. Instead of
clearly
deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around
you. Pretty soon you lose all sense of control. You feel that your life is
running you,
rather than you running your life.
On a regular basis, you have to stand back and take stock of yourself and what
you’re doing. You have to stop the clock and do some serious thinking about who
you are and where you are going. You have to evaluate your activities in the
light of
what is really important to you. You must master your time rather than becoming
a
slave to the constant flow of events and demands on your time. And you must
organize your life to achieve balance, harmony, and inner peace.
Taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure. Your ability to
think
is the most valuable trait that you possess. If you improve the quality of your
thinking, you improve the quality of your lifesometimes immediately.
Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It
is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be
reallocated
from activities of lower value to activities of higher value. All work requires
time.
And time is absolutely essential for the important relationships in your life.
The very
act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin
to
improve your personal time management immediately.
I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a
calculator
or a cellular telephone. It was something that you used so that you could get
more
done in a shorter period of time and eventually be paid more money. Then I
learned
that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core
skill upon
which everything else in life depends.
In your work or business life, there are so many demands on your time from
other people that very little of your time is yours to use as you choose.
However, at
home and in your personal life you can exert a tremendous amount of control
over
how you use your time. And it is in this area that I want to focus.
Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through
what is really important to you in life. And it only makes sense if you
organize it
around specific things that you want to accomplish. You need to set goals in
three
major areas of your life. First, you need family and personal goals. These are
the
reasons why you get up in the morning, why you work hard and upgrade your
skills,
why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your
time.
What are your personal and family goals, both
tangible and intangible? A tangible
family goal could be a bigger house, a better car, a larger television set, a
vacation,
or anything else that costs money. An intangible goal would be to build a
higher
quality relationship with your spouse and children, to spend more time with
your
family going for walks or reading books. Achieving these family and personal
goals
are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.
The second area of goals is your business and career goals. These are the
“how” goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, “why” goals. How can
you achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family
goals? How
can you develop the skills and abilities to stay ahead of the curve in your
career?
Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when balanced
with
family and personal goals.
The third type of goals are your personal development goals. Remember, you
can’t achieve much more on the outside than what you have achieved on the
inside.
Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve
worthwhile
things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile
person
in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you want to build your
life.
Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you
really
want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve. But in
order to
do it, you must go to work on yourself and never stop.
Once you have a list of your personal and family goals, your business and
career
goals, and your self-development goals, you can then organize the list by
priority.
This brings us to the difference between priorities and posteriorities. In
order to get
your personal time under control, you must decide very clearly upon your
priorities.
You must decide on the most important things that you could possible be doing
to
give yourself the same amount of happiness, satisfaction, and joy in life. But
at the
same time, you must establish posteriorities as well. Just as priorities are
things
that you do more of and sooner, posteriorities are things that you do less of
and
later.
The fact is, your calendar is full. You have no spare time. Your time is
extremely
valuable. Therefore, for you to do anything new, you will have to stop doing
something old. In order to get into something, you will have to get out of
something
else. In order to pick something up, you will have to put something down.
Before
you make any new commitment of your time, you must firmly decide what
activities
you are going to discontinue in your personal life.
If you want to spend more time with your family, for example, you must decide
what activities you currently engage in that are preventing you from doing so.
A principle of time management says that hard time pushes out soft time.
This
means that hard time, such as working, will push out soft time, such as the
time you
spend with your family. If you don’t get your work done at the office because
you
don’t use your time well, you almost invariably have to rob that time from your
family. As a result, because your family is important to you, you find yourself
in a
values conflict. You feel stressed and irritable. You feel a tremendous amount
of
pressure. You know in your heart that you should be spending more time with the
important people in your life, but because you didn’t get your work done, you
have
to fulfill those responsibilities before you can spend time with your spouse
and
children.
Think of it this way. Every minute you waste during
the waking day is time that
your family will ultimately be deprived of. So concentrate on working when you
are
at work so that you can concentrate on your family when you are at home.
There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually to keep
your
personal life in balance. The first question is, “What is really important to
me?”
Whenever you find yourself with too much to do and too little time, stop and
ask
yourself, “What is it that is really important for me to do in this situation?”
Then,
make sure that what you are doing is the answer to that question.
The second question is, “What are my highest value activities?” In your
personal
life, this means, “What are the things that I do that give me the greatest
pleasure
and satisfaction? Of all the things that I could be doing at any one time, what
are
the things that I could do to add the greatest value to my life?”
And the final question for you to ask over and over again is, “What is the most
valuable use of my time right now?” Since you can only do one thing at a time,
you
must constantly organize your life so that you are doing one thing, the most
important thing, at every moment.
Personal time management enables you to choose what to do first, what to do
second, and what not to do at all. It enables you to organize every aspect of
your
life so that you can get the greatest joy, happiness, and satisfaction out of
everything you do.
