7 Mental Techniques to Improve Your Time Management
Time management is all about making the most efficient use of your time and working smarter, not harder. It requires planning, patience and lots of discipline. If you feel motivated but are not sure where to start, fear not! One of the best ways to stay focused on accomplishing your goals is by prioritizing. Brian Tracy explains & techniques that can help you out with time.
Beneficial time management is something most of us struggle with. In a world that certainly has no shortage of distractions, it becomes all too easy to waste away hours or even days on activities that are neither useful nor really all that enjoyable.
Related: Time Is Your Most Valuable Resource—Don’t Waste It
If you would like to start getting more value out of the hours you’ve been given, check out these seven mental techniques for improving your time management.
1. Visualize your daily goals.
When you wake up each morning, decide then and there what you want to do with that day. What tasks do you want to accomplish? What activities do you want to enjoy? (It’s important to note that daily goals don’t necessarily have to be work-related. Perhaps your goal for the day is to spend time with your family or enjoy a day on the golf course.) Then take a few minutes to visualize these tasks as already completed. How would you feel if they were already done? This sense of fulfilment will renew your drive to complete your tasks that day and not put them off any longer.
2. Avoid putting off tasks.
We as humans have this unfortunate tendency to spend more mental energy worrying about the tasks we have to do than we spend actually doing them. When you put off tasks, they’re always going to be in the back of your mind. It’s difficult to enjoy leisure time when you’re always either consciously or subconsciously thinking about the work you are putting off. To avoid wasting mental energy worrying about these unfinished to-do’s, always complete tasks as they come up.
3. Set deadlines.
Few things are more motivating than a deadline. Some tasks given to you will inherently come with a deadline, but for tasks that don’t, you stand to benefit a lot by setting one of your own. Deadlines have a way of breaking procrastination and can motivate you even when you have no desire to complete the task. It’s important, though, when you set deadlines for yourself that you actually stick to them. If you start ignoring the deadlines you set, then soon they will have little value to your time management efforts.