Control Your Day or Your Day Will Control You
April 7, 2008
Time is among the most valuable of resources and all you can do with it is use it. You cannot save it and once spent, you can never get it back. You cannot buy more and you cannot steal it from someone else.
Spending time wisely naturally plays a big role in the level of success a person can achieve. You can read all the self help literature you want but without some sort of plan for your day, your day will simply “happen” to you. You will not accomplish much and you will miss out on new opportunities because you will be in such a constant state of being behind, that you will be out of time for anything else.
Your first step is to plan your day. Create a routine for writing down the tasks you need to complete for the day, as well as to set and review your goals. This could be at night before you go to bed or first thing in the morning.
Set times to start and finish your projects so that one task doesn’t hijack your whole day. Divide big tasks into a series of smaller ones to be completed in increments.
Record tasks and set goals. When necessary, attach start and stop times so that you don’t get stuck on one task while others go unattended. The timelines will also help you stay focused. Some tasks are bigger than others.
Planning may be key, but acceptance is important too, for even the best made plans can be thwarted by unexpected tasks. Realize that it is okay, deal with the situation and move on. It is so easy to put a small task aside to be completed later, not realizing the pile up you will soon be facing.
We have many pitfalls in our day that work against our time management efforts. We tend to spend too much time contemplating the start of a new project and often avoiding it. So just start it. Then finish it. It is bad practice to pick it up, think about it and put it aside for later only to repeat the process again in an hour.
More time is often spent avoiding it than working on it. It has to get done no matter how much you wish it didn’t. So decide whether you are going to work on it now or later, then move on and continue managing your day.
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