How to get yourself organised - and save time
Time is a constant. There are twenty-four hours in a day, no more, no less. The challenge is to maximise their use - and it’s possible, provided you approach the issue methodically. All accomplishment in life, other than that which results by accident, passes through three stages - the goal, the plan, and the action. By maintaining this sequence, you can better organise yourself to squeeze more out of those twenty-four hours...
1. Identify what is strategic - to you.
Know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. Identify strategic issues - the essentials of your job or the main reasons why you are employed in your current position - and isolate them from those that are non-strategic. An excessive number, more than six, say, indicates that you need to clarify your role description. Free yourself of the non-strategic issues: eliminate or reduce them significantly - usually by delegating.
2. Set goals and detail actions.
Having identified the issues strategic to your personal operations, you need to be quite clear about the goals associated with each issue. If you want to achieve those goals you will need to take specific actions within a reasonable time. Activities or blockages hampering the achievement of goals should be reduced or eliminated. You’ll find many ‘urgent’ jobs now assume a different priority in your life.
3. Plan your year, month, week, and day.
Planning how to make the best use of your time is a form of project management. And, of course, the parts of your project over which you’ll have most control are those relating to today and the next twenty-four hours. So, while being aware of the overall picture, your diary for the next two days will require your immediate attention: it will be far more detailed than next month’s diary. Though effective time management entails more than diaries and to-do lists, both play vital roles in keeping you focused on the key issues, being aware of the value of time - and being organised.
