You can't manage time. You can't save time. No one has more or less time in an hour, a day, a week, or a year than anyone else. And yet, some people seem to manage to accomplish more with the time they have than others. Some people seem to be more satisfied with their lives and less stressed than others. What's the secret?
Cyndi Maxey and Kevin E. O'Connor provide some answers in their new book 10 Steps to Successful Time Management. Right from the start they say "Our goal is not to save you time. Rather, it is to save your life-the life you want to live while everything else is getting in your way." The key to doing this is identifying what is important to you and learning to self-regulate your behavior so you can use your time well.
In 10 steps, Maxey and O'Connor outline some ideas, strategies, tools, and techniques for making the most of your time:
- Step 1: Forget the Myth-Being Busy Isn't Being Productive. You can sometimes compare a person who thinks of him- or herself as busy to a mouse running on a wheel. There's a lot of activity going on, a lot of energy being expended, but the mouse isn't actually getting anywhere. In this step, Maxey and O'Connor provide some reminders that enable you to get over your addiction to "busy-ness" and make your time and efforts count.
- Step 2: Manage Your Energy; Manage Your Life. To get the most out of your time, you need to understand how to manage and focus your energy. The key to energy management is understanding your emotions.
- Step 3: Be Useful and Stick to the Purpose. A lot of people get bogged down trying to make everything perfect. They lose sight of what the point was because they are so caught up in the details. Another way to look at your activities is to determine if they are useful and if they are aligned with what you want to achieve.
- Step 4: Maintain Clarity and Move Forward. All of us turn to mindless default behaviors that feel good, but don't get you anywhere. These are the things you do when you don't feel like attacking that big important project yet, like cleaning out your email box, clearing off your desk, or surfing the web. This step provides guidance for how to get over that feeling of "I don't wanna."
- Step 5: Manage to Your Advantage. This step gives tips and advice for managing tasks like email, writing, and meetings.
- Step 6: Pay Attention to Your Key Contacts. Learning to focus on the key people who have the most influence in your life is the important lesson of this step.
- Step 7: Connect and Get the Most From Your Time. Networking is one of the best things you can do with your time because achieving your goals is going to require help from others. This step highlights the importance of tending your network and learning to really connect with other people.
- Step 8: Understand the Forces That Affect Your Use of Time and Energy. The term time management typically suggests that we are trying to save a few minutes here and there and save that time for other endeavors. Problem is, you can't bank time. What you can do is evaluate what you are doing and how it relates to your overall goals. What does this moment mean in your life?
- Step 9: Focus on What Is Significant. It's easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day tasks and activities that seem to amass every time you look away for a minute. What's not so easy is slowing down and paying attention to what really matters to you. This step provides a step-by-step technique for ensuring that your thoughts support your goals.
- Step 10: Make Time Your Friend. The final step presents three qualities that will enable you to stay in control by aligning your use of time with your desires and goals.
Learn more about the book and get a free sample chapter here. To purchase the book, click here.
