Time Management Tips

To Help You Achieve Your Goals

Welcome to the Time Management Tips page. This web site is about setting and achieving personal goals. To see more goals articles please go to our achieve your personal goals or setting goals pages.

In fact, we can't manage time. There are 24 hours in a day, seven days a week, and we can't change that. So effective time management is not about managing time. It's about managing ourselves.

A more recent book by Mark Forster takes this a bit further, saying that it's about managing our attention.

If you're not really focused, and if your attention is really elsewhere, you probably won't make much progress.

So the question is, 'how can we best manage our attention so as to achieve our goals?'.

The first point to note is that Everything Counts, as explained by Gary Ryan Blair, the self-styled 'goals guy'. Everything we do, every decision we take, moves us either nearer or further away from our goals - certainly our most important goals.

Many time management tips you read about are concerned with getting through all the different items on your 'to do' list. This advice is often concerned with time management 'efficiency'. On the other hand, most people now recognise that time management 'effectiveness' is more important.

Let's look at a concrete example in terms of my goal of building this web site.

I've broken down this web site building goal into a number of mini-goals of building one web page at a time. Now, I have plenty of other tasks on my 'to do' list that are concerned with other stuff altogether - like keeping my office tidy. But however efficiently I carry out those other tasks they will not directly help me achieve my goal of building my next web page.

Or maybe another way of putting it is that they might play a supportive rather than a key role. If I just keep my office tidy and never build another web page, this web site just won't get built. 'First things first' as Stephen Covey says.

No, I need to look for - and act on - those few tasks that will accomplish my goal. These are the tasks that I have already identified when I split down my goal into mini-goals, and my mini-goals into individual tasks.

Managing your attention is an important part of getting help to acheive your goals. But make sure you focus on getting the tasks done that will lead you directly towards your goal.

So, with a view to helping you move towards your goals, let me take you through what you can expect to find in this time management tips section of the web site.

These include the books I've mentioned above.

Personal Organizers
This page looks at a Personal Organizer (or Time Planner or Calendar) system for dealing with your daily and weekly schedule.

Time management tips are useless unless you put them into operation.

Time Management Skills For Achieving Goals
On this page I summarise the time management skills which I believe will be most important to you in achieving your goals. Partly this list of skills is based on my own experience, but also I've drawn from the time management books I've read when researching material for this web site.

Time Management Strategy For Achieving Goals
Here I've given some tips on what I think is the best general approach to managing your time. If you follow this strategy you should find it easier to put your time management tips and skills into effect.

Stephen Covey Page
This page covers some of Stephen Covey's time management tips that I couldn't fit in anywhere else!

Getting Things Done System
David Allen's Gettting Things Done system for workflow management is excellent for controlling all your paper, emails and projects. He explains exactly what to do step by step.

Time Management Quotes Page
Here you can read time management tips in bite-sized chunks. The quotes are all from books featured on this web site.

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