HOW TO MANAGE TIME WITH EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES

Time is a continuous chronological event which succeeds itself, from the past to the present and to the future. Time never stops. Time wasted can never be regained. Time, just like the popular time line in your Facebook and Google + pages continues in a sequence of events and activities. You cannot stop time as a human being, just as it is equally true, that you cannot control the seasons. Even as seasons come and go in a cyclic manner and cannot be broken, so does time go on and on and cannot be contained.

How can you manage Time?

The truth is that no one can manage time. Ultimately time manages human beings. This facts however intimidating, does not stop you from utilizing time to achieve the things you care about in a most advantageous way.

To be successful in life, you must have the ability to manage the activities and events that consume your time. This is the secret of successful Individuals, Businesses and Governments.

The simplest way of managing your activities, is to write down what you want to do in the order of priority and have the will power to do them. Event or activity management is as simple as that. For emphasis sake managing time, involves listing what you hope to achieve within the given working hours in a sheet of paper and doing them.

Time is a convertible resource

Though time is a depleting resource, it is convertible hence it can be used to generate valuable businesses, beautiful relationships and achieve excellent goals in your life. To be able to pull off, you must take control of activities and prioritize them by setting SMART goals, breaking goals down into small bits and safeguarding yourself from time wasters.

Setting SMART goals

The first and the quickest way of converting time is by setting SMART goals which helps you to maximize time in all spheres of human endeavors.  So what is a goal? A goal is what you desire to happen with deadline. Goals without deadlines are mere wishes. How do you set SMART goals?  Let your goals be specific, measurable, achievable realistic, and time bound. A specific goal is unambiguous. You are clear about what you must do to get the job done. A goal must be measurable to ensure it is easy to gauge how far you have gone on the project. A goal must be achievable to determine how realizable it is giving the time and resource constrain we all face daily. A goal must be realistic so it is not out of the ordinary but very practical and achievable. A goal must be time bound so its realization does not become a mere wish. A cut off time for accomplishing any goal makes it a worthwhile pursuit.

Breaking goals down into small bits to make them achievable

To make goals easier to achieve, you may decide to break them down into mini goals to help you to stay motivated to achieve them. You may be intimidated by the size of the tasks that you must carry out to attain the goal. So breaking down the goals into small chunks, deceives the mind into thinking it has little to do.  

Another way is to divide the goals into short term (from 1 month to 1 year), mid range (from 2 to 4 years) and long term goals (from 5 to 10 years). There are no hard and fast rules for pursuing your goals or setting the time for goal attainment. The time lines you see here are not absolute so feel free to apply the methods that suit your pace.

Safeguard yourself against Time wasters

There are many time wasters that eat up your time daily. Identifying them, will enable you set rules for dealing with them. This will in turn aids you to take full advantage of your time, to achieve your goals optimally. The time wasters are; procrastination, poor planning, personal disorganization, poor planning, failure to delegate,  indecision, poor listening habit, unnecessary interruptions, too much work, some phone calls, some emails, some meetings, lack of self discipline, leaving tasks unfinished, perfectionism, inter office travel, mistakes, overburdening yourself, distractions, gossip and lack of authority.

Some of these time wasters are induced internally while some are induced externally. For instance, lack of self discipline and procrastination are induced internally whereas some phone calls, unnecessary interruptions and some emails are externally induced time wasters. Now that you know these enemies, shield yourself from them and have more time in your hands to purse your heart’s desire.

How to increase time

To increase time available for you from 24 hours to 25 hours or more, leverage on the help of others and devise time saving mechanism. Let’s see how this can be achieved below.

Leverage on the help of others

You can expand time so that you have it to do more activities, by leveraging on the help of others to get tasks done. Instead of doing all the task by yourself, appoint excellent workmen who have been chosen and trained amongst your employees or team members, to help you bear the burden of growing your business or executing your project. For instance, affiliate marketing programs are examples of the use of leverage to multiply the sales force, and get more products sold, businesses expanded to create wealth for product owners and the affiliate marketers.

Devise time saving system

You can decide to add specific number of hours daily to your twenty four hours by borrowing your sleeping time. It is easy to do this. Just set your sleeping time by one hour backwards and wake up one hour earlier. For instance; if your sleeping time was 10 pm and wake up time was 6am daily, just determine to sleep by 9 pm and wake up by 5 am. In this way you have saved one hour daily or 7 hours weekly, 28 hours monthly and 336 hours yearly. Can you see how easy it is to save time to achieve whatever goals you set for yourself? 

You have heard it said over and over that time is money. The fact remains that time wasted are opportunities for advancement squandered. Let us suppose you diligently applied the above suggestions and you were able to save an hour a day. You could use the time saved in numerous ways, such as to create wealth for you or build a better relationship with your employees, spouse and children. You could decide to improve your business by taking one hour daily to think of ways of creating better goods, better marketing programs or creating an improved work environment. You could also decide to use the one hour saved to write a book, learn a new skill, develop a passive income source and enroll in a long distance learning program in the university to get a degree. The possibilities are limitless. You are only limited by how creative you are and what goals you set.

Be assured that if your goals are worthwhile, you will find time for them. Why do I say this? The reason is not far to seek. It is the value of a venture or project that determines the amount of time you allot to it.

Conclusion

Time is a convertible resource, which cannot be managed by anyone because of its continuous and never ending nature. Success in life is guaranteed for those that have the ability, to manage activities and events that eat up their time.  Though, everyone is allocated an equal amount of time in a day, by the management of events, you can increase time and get more done. To get more activities or events done, set SMART goals, break goals down into small bits, and safeguard yourself from time wasters. To increase the use of time, leverage on the help of others and devise other time saving methods.

I urge you to read and apply this time saving and maximizing tips, to live a more productive, prosperous and healthy life.