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.

You will find a variety of time management tips on this web site because spending your time effectively is vital to achieving your goals.

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.

I first read this idea, quite a few years ago, in Stephen Covey's book 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People'. A book I read more recently, by Mark Forster takes this a bit further. He makes the point that it is about managing our attention.

For example, let's say that you're spending some time working towards your goal. 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 follow time management tips to 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.

Looking for the best time management tips 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.

Time Management Books
This page provides brief reviews of books that contain valuable time management tips and strategies. These include the books I've mentioned above. I've also provided links to my detailed reviews of selected books, and also to Amazon so you can view what other readers say.

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!

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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