Does your time get trapped by following these 3 old-fashioned time management techniques? Time management trainers still pull the wool over your eyes with the old-fashioned technique of prioritizing by importance. Another problem area is scheduling activities to time. And a third problem is using weekly to-do lists. So now that I've contradicted the 3 major time management techniques, thus dug my self a whole of credibility, I will make it worth your while to understand why this is so important for your future time management skill with the rise of modern faster paced living conditions and the technological provision of a lifestyle of liberty and flexibility. Why does time fly? Procrastination (let's be honest here), absent mindedness, deadline pressures, limited resources, overwhelm... not to mention OTHER PEOPLE making demands on your precious time! Today's time management system must incorporate your working life with your personal life. Your hobbies and social activities must be tied in with your career development. This is the modern era of efficient organized lifestyles after all. Weekends are a great time to catch up o life's basic necessities. Because the week is so hectic. But imagine a handful of chores including cooking, filing in some documents, getting the pet to the vet, mowing the grass. The chores easily stack up. How can you really prioritize it all? So let's begin with a question: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by level of importance recently? It works doesn't it. In a messy kind of way. Not quite 'plain sailing' though... It's ok if you don't have much to do, but then you wouldn't be bothered about a time management system in the first place if you didn't have quite a few things to juggle. So you've probably noticed, just writing down a list and prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn't work as well as you'd like. Do you have to neglect certain areas of life because other things are 'more important'? Should you list priorities by 1 to 10 and just focus on number 1 until it's done and then move on to number 2? If you organized everything by level of importance you will end up rushing around putting out fires because you neglected things until they were practically emergencies, such as cutting the grass (forest!) or exercising, or organizing the files on your computer. So Let's Try Combining Importance with Urgency. If it's Saturday afternoon, and Sally's appointment with tutor is 4pm, then that's an urgent priority. So you can read your memo after taking Sally. But what about your hair cut? At what point do you consider that 'urgent'? When it's long? Or when it's 'too' long? Or when the wife nags, or the boss frowns? Prioritizing by urgency, what would you do? Take your daughter. Get your hair cut. Read the office paper work. More and more of life gets neglected and messy. Taking your daughter to her lesson is not as important as reading the office information. So the office work is more important (you'll be fired if you don't keep up). But the lesson for your daughter is in an hour, so that's urgent. You could try doing them both at the same time couldn't you? Finally, when your wife pokes fun at your overgrown hair, you'll finally adjust it from the priority list C to the priority list A. But you need to take the wife shopping today so that's an A too. Along comes Saturday 3m, and the tutorship and office memo are all also on the A list. The ABCDE method of prioritizing by importance creates a lot of difficulty. Even with just those handful of tasks to account for. When life is far more varied and complex. And you know the mess experienced with time management when everything is put into the mix. Trying to prioritize by importance and urgency is, as I hope you'll agree, next to impossible, and highly impractical. It doesn't work for time management now because modern lifestyles are faster paced and more integrated. That is, you can do more things in the same locations. And the borders of the work place, and working at home have blurred. When you free yourself of the higher authority of traditional time management techniques you will have a chance to develop your natural time management skill. Hopefully this article has made you skeptical of following normal time management systems so that you search and find something genuinely better for modern life.
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Does your time get trapped by following these 3 old-fashioned time management techniques?
Nathan T Shaw provides a wide range of time management skills and has published a breakthrough time management system available to our readers. You can get a unique content version of this article.
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