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Time Management Techniques: It's About Being More Effective
Are you trying to cram more into your day? If you are you're probably stressed out, exhausted, and irritable because you're working too hard. If this sounds like you take a time out. You've got to stop focusing on the wrong things before you burn out. You probably think you just need to figure out how to cram more into your day, but that's the wrong approach. You're only focusing on efficiency.
Are you trying to cram more into your day? If you are you’re probably stressed out, exhausted, and irritable because you’re working too hard. If this sounds like you take a time out. You’ve got to stop focusing on the wrong things before you burn out. You probably think you just need to figure out how to cram more into your day, but that’s the wrong approach. You’re only focusing on efficiency.
Efficiency places the focus on doing things in the least amount of time. Efficiency is certainly a consideration, but it isn’t the only consideration. Whenever you can develop ways to perform necessary and important tasks in less time you definitely want to do that.
The more important question for you to answer is whether you should even be doing the task. When you consider importance and value effectiveness comes into play. Effectiveness is about doing the right things. The right things are those actions that produce the greatest results from the least amount of effort. You only have a finite amount of time and you need to get the most value from the time you have. So, your main focus should be on taking the actions that produce the greatest results for you now. If you don’t guard your time you get caught up in a bunch of mundane details that don’t produce results.
I’ve seen sales people in a slump spending inordinate amounts of time neatly organizing their client files and making meticulous notes when that time would have been much better spent focusing on how to make their next valuable contact. How often do you fritter away precious time on low value tasks? In addition to the obvious time wasters there are all those gray area tasks that seem productive, but they really aren’t.
Are you more likely to produce results spending an hour cold calling strangers or attending a breakfast you’re prospects are likely to attend? As you make better choices you begin to develop good time management skills. Most people confuse activity with results and suffer the consequences of those misguided choices.
Effectiveness results from both focus and priorities. You have to focus on the actions that produce the greatest results. And you have to prioritize your actions so you always have time for the actions with the highest value, and you never have time for low value activities.