Perhaps the greatest single
problem that people have today is “time poverty.” Working people have too much
to do and too little time for their personal lives. Most people feel overwhelmed
with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further
behind they feel. This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill can cause you
to fall into the reactive/responsive mode of living. Instead of clearly deciding
what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around you.
Pretty soon you lose all sense of control. You feel that your life is running
you, rather than you running your life.
On a regular basis, you have to stand back and take stock of yourself and what
you’re doing. You have to stop the clock and do some serious thinking about who
you are and where you are going. You have to evaluate your activities in the
light of what is really important to you. You must master your time rather than
becoming a slave to the constant flow of events and demands on your time. And
you must organize your life to achieve balance, harmony, and inner peace. Taking
action without thinking is the cause of every failure. Your ability to think is
the most valuable trait that you possess. If you improve the quality of your
thinking, you improve the quality of your life, sometimes immediately.
Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It
is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be
reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value. All
work requires time. And time is absolutely essential for the important
relationships in your life. The very act of taking a moment to think about your
time before you spend it will begin to improve your personal time management
immediately.
I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a calculator
or a cellular telephone. It was something that you used so that you could get
more done in a shorter period of time and eventually be paid more money. Then I
learned that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the
core skill upon which everything else in life depends.
In your work or business life, there are so many demands on your time from other
people that very little of your time is yours to use as you choose. However, at
home and in your personal life you can exert a tremendous amount of control over
how you use your time. And it is in this area that I want to focus.
Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through
what is really important to you in life. And it only makes sense if you organize
it around specific things that you want to accomplish. You need to set goals in
three major areas of your life. First, you need family and personal goals. These
are the reasons why you get up in the morning, why you work hard and upgrade
your skills, why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the
demands on your time.
What are your personal and family goals, both tangible and intangible? A
tangible family goal could be a bigger house, a better car, a larger television
set, a vacation, or anything else that costs money. An intangible goal would be
to build a higher quality relationship with your spouse and children, to spend
more time with your family going for walks or reading books. Achieving these
family and personal goals are the real essence of time management, and its major
purpose.
The second area of goals are your business and career goals. These are the “how”
goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, “why” goals. How can you
achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals?
How can you develop the skills and abilities to stay ahead of the curve in your
career? Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when
balanced with family and personal goals.
The third type of goals are your personal development goals. Remember, you can’t
achieve much more on the outside than what you have achieved on the inside. Your
outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve
worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you must become a
worthwhile person in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you
want to build your life. Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can
become anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really
want to achieve. But in order to do it, you must go to work on yourself and
never stop.
Once you have a list of your personal and family goals, your business and career
goals, and your self-development goals, you can then organize the list by
priority. This brings us to the difference between priorities and
posteriorities. In order to get your personal time under control, you must
decide very clearly upon your priorities. You must decide on the most important
things that you could possible be doing to give yourself the same amount of
happiness, satisfaction, and joy in life. But at the same time, you must
establish posteriorities as well. Just as priorities are things that you do more
of and sooner, posteriorities are things that you do less of and later.
The fact is, your calendar is full. You have no spare time. Your time is
extremely valuable. Therefore, for you to do anything new, you will have to stop
doing something old. In order to get into something, you will have to get out of
something else. In order to pick something up, you will have to put something
down. Before you make any new commitment of your time, you must firmly decide
what activities you are going to discontinue in your personal life. If you want
to spend more time with your family, for example, you must decide what
activities you currently engage in that are preventing you from doing so.
A principle of time management says that hard time pushes out soft time. This
means that hard time, such as working, will push out soft time, such as the time
you spend with your family. If you don’t get your work done at the office
because you don’t use your time well, you almost invariably have to rob that
time from your family. As a result, because your family is important to you, you
find yourself in a values conflict. You feel stressed and irritable. You feel a
tremendous amount of pressure. You know in your heart that you should be
spending more time with the important people in your life, but because you
didn’t get your work done, you have to fulfill those responsibilities before you
can spend time with your spouse and children.
Think of it this way. Every minute you waste during the waking day is time that
your family will ultimately be deprived of. So concentrate on working when you
are at work so that you can concentrate on your family when you are at home.
There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually to keep your
personal life in balance. The first question is, “What is really important to
me?” Whenever you find yourself with too much to do and too little time, stop
and ask yourself, “What is it that is really important for me to do in this
situation?” Then, make sure that what you are doing is the answer to that
question.
The second question is, “What are my highest value activities?” In your personal
life, this means, “What are the things that I do that give me the greatest
pleasure and satisfaction? Of all the things that I could be doing at any one
time, what are the things that I could do to add the greatest value to my life?”
And the final question for you to ask over and over again is, “What is the most
valuable use of my time right now?” Since you can only do one thing at a time,
you must constantly organize you life so that you are doing one thing, the most
important thing, at every moment. Personal time management enables you to choose
what to do first, what to do second, and what not to do at all. It enables you
to organize every aspect of your life so that you can get the greatest joy,
happiness, and satisfaction out of everything you do.