Management Concept Style

Many of us remember the days of dealing with school schedules. You may have tried to implement a daily schedule to help you manage your time more effectively. But is it helping you as much as it could?

To make a time management schedule work the best, you need to understand how it works, and learn to keep to it.

Management Concept

Before you can build an effective schedule, you need to understand the concept of time management.

What Does "Time Management" Really Mean?

Not surprisingly, it means managing your time. That is, being productive, and focused on the tasks that are important, and need to be completed, instead of wasting time on un-necessary and frivolous things.

A schedule can help you to manage your time by creating blocks for each task, or group of tasks, you need to accomplish throughout your day, keeping you more productive.

If you don't have a clear plan for what you should be doing at any given time, it's more difficult to maintain a flow, and you tend to choose time wasters (like television) instead of a specific task.

We all have the same 24 hours, every day. By using a time management schedule, you can decide ahead of time how you should spend those hours to get the things you need to get done, done. You should even schedule in down-time -- we all need to rest and relax.

Making a Time Management Schedule

To make an effective schedule, you have to do more than just think about it in your mind. I find paper and pen most effective--even if I then transfer it to my PDA, smartphone or online calendar.

Start by writing down all the things you need to complete. This can be daily tasks, or to start more simply, what you need to get done tomorrow.

Group related tasks together, and associate a time estimate to each one. Don't worry about how accurate the estimate is. If you're unsure, pad the time a little bit--scheduling more time is much better than scheduling less. And, as you work through your schedule, you'll get a better idea of how much time each task takes.

Once you have your tasks grouped and estimated, start to organize them into a schedule. Make sure to take into account priority (do the more important things earlier in the day), and also time-of-day requirements (like picking up the kids from school at 3:30pm).

Now that you've got the beginnings of your time management schedule, work through it. It may take a week or two of refining before you've got the time estimates down, and the priorities in the right order.

Don't be afraid to change the schedule. Just use it as a tool to be more productive throughout your day.

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We are all familiar with the concept of "time", but when you add the word "management" behind it, things can get a little cloudy. Simply put, time management is the process of managing your time. People can make this more confusing and harder than it has to be when they try to get too technical and start creating "time maps" and flow charts.

When it comes down to it, it is a lot simpler than that. We all have twenty four hours each day. By practicing time management strategies, we are deciding how to use those hours to accomplish all the tasks we have on our to-do lists.

Management Concept

Having a schedule is a fundamental part of time management. You can imagine your schedule as a road-map. It provides important information about where you are going and how you can get there. Without it, you may take a wrong turn somewhere and find yourself lost. Once someone is lost, it may take some time before they get back on track, and they usually arrive to their destination a bit later than they would have liked.

When you have a schedule, you can look at it and see what you need to do each day. You'll know if you are on track, and if you aren't, what you need to do to get back on course.

How To Make a Schedule

One of the first things to do when making a schedule is to write down all the things you have to do on a piece of paper. Some people keep separate work and family schedules, and if you decide that would work best for you, you can divvy those tasks up later. For now, simply write out everything that needs to be done on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis.

Once you have everything written out and in front of you, it's time to start sorting between the common themes. You can do this by assigning a highlighter color to each theme (such as family, work, daily, monthly, weekly) or by taking out another piece of paper and writing those columns on it, and rewriting all the tasks into the appropriate column.

Now that you have all of your tasks sorted out, try to give a time estimate to each one. You may even want to time yourself for a week or two on these tasks, as you may be very surprised at how long some things take.

For instance, you may think it only takes 45 minutes to go to the grocery store, but in reality it could take an hour and 15 minutes. You may think it only takes 15 minutes to run up to the school and pick up the kids, but may find it actually takes 25 minutes.

In many cases, people underestimate the time it takes to do things, and this is one of the reasons they think they aren't getting enough done. By timing yourself, you will get a visual picture of your time. When you see how long it really takes to accomplish your regular tasks, you will be able to see how many things you can fit into a normal day. You won't constantly be trying to push yourself to do more.

Once you have written down your tasks and estimated the time it takes to accomplish them, you can start planning your schedule. Some people like to have a daily schedule that is very organized with certain tasks assigned to certain times and others prefer to keep a weekly schedule that is more flexible.

Jim Sanderson writes custom articles for an online marketing company.  Call today to receive a FREE website marketing strategy for your small business ( http://BusinessMediaPublishing.com ).

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