Time Management by Setting Goals

Time management, in its simplest form, means organizing daily tasks to help one to pursue what is most important in life. While it may seem tempting to dive right into a new planning tool or organizing formula that promises to help get more out of the day, your efforts would be put to better use by creating a clear picture of what you want to achieve. What is your most important goal and how clearly do you see it? If our goals never come into clear focus even the best time management techniques can’t help us achieve them. Until we have a clear and precise picture of what we want, our efforts to manage our time will falter and fall short.

If time management is going to be successful it must be preceded by goal setting. In seven simple steps you can take a vague idea and shape it into a clearly defined goal that is worthy of planning your day and your life around. These steps include:

1. Decide exactly what you want - As Ben Stein said, "The indispensable first step of getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want." If you don't know what you want, odds are certain that you will never achieve it, no matter how well you plan your day. However, once you can clearly see an exciting goal time management becomes not just another program to apply but a tool that gets you what you want.

2. Write it down - It is estimated that the mind has over 60,000 thoughts every day. Unless you do something to make your goal stand apart from the tens of thousands of thoughts rapidly churning through your mind it will never come into focus. Writing down your goal brings it an important step closer to reality by separating it from the constant thought traffic in your head.

3. Set a deadline - Just as writing down a goal down brings it into space, setting a deadline brings it into time. A goal without a deadline for completion is difficult to measure and easy to procrastinate. Having a deadline makes measuring progress easier. When the deadline arrives you have either met the goal or you haven’t, it’s that simple.

4. Make a list of everything that you need to do to achieve the goal - Visualize the goal as completed and work backward to the beginning, writing down all the steps that you took to get there. As you write, new tasks will come to your attention, keep writing until you have a list of tasks for completing your goal.

5. Organize the list into a plan - Take the list of activities and place it into a sequence of individual tasks that you will need to complete to reach your goal, then prioritize the tasks to determine which ones can be done now and which ones must wait until later. This provides a plan of action to achieve your goal.

6. Take action immediately - Any plan to achieve your goal is only as good as the work you do to make it happen. Once the plan is complete start working on it immediately. As Anthony Robbins says "never leave the site of setting a goal without first taking some form of positive action toward its attainment."

7. Do something every day that brings you closer to achieving this goal - When you make the pursuit of this goal part of your daily routine you will quickly build momentum toward its attainment. More importantly anything that you focus on every day takes on a life of its own in your mind, once your mind firmly grasps a goal creativity becomes easier and new ideas appear when you least expect them.