In our fast pace world, being able to manage your time is the most precious currency. You can earn money but you cannot earn time. Time that is gone is gone forever. But time that has been spent wisely can have such a wonderful effect on your results.
Through my professional career, I have really seen a difference in terms of success between people who manage their time wisely and people who don’t. Leaders who have such a skill get things done and reach better results and faster. Why ? Because they don’t let emails or phone calls or coworkers tell them what to work on. They have a plan and they spend their time accordingly !
Remember the pareto law : 80% of your results come from 20% of your time. So being organized and focus is extremely important.
After a lot of studies about how successful people organize their day, I have developed my own routine. Here is what I have found out :
First is planning ! Ben Franklin said it well : “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. So your day starts actually the night before. Have the habit, before going to be, to define the goals you plan to achieve tomorrow but also the tasks you need to tackle. Write down your schedule on your notepad accordingly. The process of writing it down is a very intentional process that helps you to memorize the schedule. I keep my notepad with the schedule I wrote down the night before on my desk in front of me, all day long. But I don’t need to check it a lot because it is already in my mind. Thanks to that, you have a clear schedule. And you have clear goals.
I define my daily goals according to my monthly and yearly goals. I have Relationship, Health, Wealth and Spiritual goals. So every day, I define what are my small goals for the day to support these 3 categories. In the health category for example, I may write down that I will tomorrow go for a run.
Once this is defined, I can put it my schedule for the day.
So, the process is have goals for the day and define your schedule accordingly. The target is to make sure that you make time for your goals. So many times, people are exhausted at the end of the day with all they have been doing but they have not worked on their goals !!!
The secret is to be INTENTIONAL !!!! If your goal tomorrow is to go for a run to support your yearly goal of losing weight, then put it in your schedule and treat like any other appointment.
Then, you need to set some priorities with all your goals, some are more important than others. Always make sure to tackle the important goals as early as possible in the day. The more you wait through the day, the more difficult it is.
The second key secret about successful time management is to have routines. Things that you do no matter what, everyday because they are part of your standards. For example, praying every morning is part of my routine because it is my standard to be connected to GOD. Every morning, I prepare a healthy lunch to take in my lunch box at work because it is in my standard to eat healthy. Define your standards, set your daily routine accordingly and make sure to have the discipline to execute religiously every day. It doesn’t need to be a lot. Start with one thing and one easy thing. Make sure to do it for 21 days. And when you have demonstrated to yourself, that you can do this very thing consistently for 3 weeks and then it becomes really automatic in you. That means, you don’t really have to think about it to execute. When you have reached that level, you are at the point to add a second routine. I love this quote about discipline :
“Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak and esteem to all. Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.”
If every day, you keep working on your discipline through that progressive routine process, you will see astonishing results by the end of the year.
Let’s get to it ! What are your goals to accomplish tomorrow ? How is your schedule going to support that ?
“We are getting better, stronger, kinder, wiser together” – Anthony Perdrix
