Success in 12 Months: Are You Wasting Your Most Valuable Asset?
Welcome back to the Success in 12 Months blog series, as we enter Month 8!
The topic this month, time management, may or may not make you roll your eyes or cross your arms in front of your chest because you’ve been there before, you’ve heard all the information.
But I want to warn you that, yes, time management can be a repetitive topic and maybe you’ve already gone down this path before. However, the majority of people that I see in my life, and I’m sure you can agree with this, they do not manage their time well.
Time is chaotic, and our world today is busier than ever and it’s actually more important of a skill than it’s ever been before, with the amount of demands we all have on our time.
This month, I want you to really take some time to get back in touch with how you are spending your time and asking the question of yourself, “Am I directing my focus, am I actually spending my hours in a way that is most productive, and most importantly, in a way that’s going to make me the happiest at the end of the day?”
We all know that time management is a vital key to success and that all successful people get the most out of their time.
They don’t have any more time than you or I, but the most successful people simply maximize those hours and they do it very deliberately.
In fact, the people that are really experts or the highest achievers in their field are always working on improving their time management skills. In fact, many of them build teams of people that can help them systemize what they do so that they’re spending their time focused on the critical, most important tasks.
Anything that’s not relevant to what’s important to them is being delegated, is being outsourced, is being managed, and this is a fundamental key to success.
You might not be a position right now where you’re outsourcing and delegating your entire life, but the concept remains the same. Your ability to focus on the most important things and tracking where you’re spending those hours is the most critical thing you can do.
The key to time management or to any form of management is to actually manage it, to do this stuff.
So not just treating this like an intellectual exercise, not just going through the checks of saying, “Okay, time management requires this, this and this,” but actually take advantage of the tools and processes and methodologies that are available.
By the end of this month, you will become a very, very effective time manager, and you’re actually going to become the kind of person that will not allow other people to waste your time, nor will you allow your bad habits to cut back into your productive working hours.
Your Weekly Exercise: What Are Your Time Wasters?
There’s going to be a ton of different ways that you can do this, but I want to dive right into our first action step for this month, because it’s very important, and sets the stage for the other steps in the coming weeks.
The first one is to take some time to think about your biggest time wasters. You might want to spend the entire first week making notes as you go, catching yourself wasting time.
It could be that you check your email too often or you respond to text messages in an instant instead of waiting to see what it’s saying later. It might be that you’re on Facebook or social networks or things that aren’t really all that important online too often.
Or you’re wasting time with needless conversation with people just for entertainment purposes, when really a five-minute conversation would have been fine. You’re turning it into a half an hour debate that you really don’t need to be investing your time into.
These time wasters will be all over the map for you. What you really want to do is become consciously aware of each and every one of them and start taking track of how they’re impacting you.
We’ll take this further next week.
As I always say, share your thoughts and your progress, leave a comment below or e-mail me and let me know what’s been happening for you. I’m investing in you and want to support you in your success!
Your partner in making the most of time,
James