Time Management Skills – Start Here!

Work smarter. Improve time utilization.

Spend your time wisely.

© iStockphoto/v_rybakov

This section discusses personal time management skills. These are essential skills for effective people.

People who use these techniques routinely are the highest achievers in all walks of life, from business to sport to public service. If you use these skills well, then you will be able to function effectively, even under intense pressure.

At the heart of time management is an important shift in focus:

Concentrate on results, not on being busy

Many people spend their days in a frenzy of activity, but achieve very little because they are not concentrating on the right things.

The 80:20 Rule

This is neatly summed up in the Pareto Principle, or the '80:20 Rule'. This argues that typically 80% of unfocussed effort generates only 20% of results. The remaining 80% of results are achieved with only 20% of the effort. While the ratio is not always 80:20, this broad pattern of a small proportion of activity generating non-scalar returns recurs so frequently as to be the norm in many areas.

By applying the time management tips and skills in this section you can optimize your effort to ensure that you concentrate as much of your time and energy as possible on the high payoff tasks. This ensures that you achieve the greatest benefit possible with the limited amount of time available to you.

Time Management Tools

By the end of this section, you should have a much clearer understanding of how to use time to its greatest effect.

These tools and many, many more are explained in Mind Tools' Make Time For Success! This contains more than 100 pages of time tested tips, techniques and secrets to improve your time management skills and get the most that life has to offer. You will learn how to set realistic goals, generate a life plan and leverage all of the opportunities that life has to offer. Many of the lessons include workbook exercises so that you really understand how to put these invaluable skills to work in your life.

Join the Mind Tools Club

Get training, help and ideas to boost your career: the Mind Tools Club gives you much, much more than you get here on the basic Mind Tools site.

And if you join before midnight on May 9th, we'll also give you a FREE copy of our Future-Proof Your Career workbook.

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