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Time Management Skills
This chapter discusses personal time management skills. These are essential skills for effective people.
People who use these techniques routinely are the highest achievers in all walks of life, from business to sport to public service. If you use these skills well, then you will be able to function effectively, even under intense pressure.
At the heart of time management is an important shift in focus:
Concentrate on results, not on being busy
Many people spend their days in a frenzy of activity, but achieve very little because they are not concentrating on the right things.
The 80:20 Rule
This is neatly summed up in the Pareto Principle, or the '80:20 Rule'. This argues that typically 80% of unfocussed effort generates only 20% of results. The remaining 80% of results are achieved with only 20% of the effort. While the ratio is not always 80:20, this broad pattern of a small proportion of activity generating non-scalar returns recurs so frequently as to be the norm in many areas.
By applying the skills in this chapter you can optimize your effort to ensure that you concentrate as much of your time and energy as possible on the high payoff tasks. This ensures that you achieve the greatest benefit possible with the limited amount of time available to you.
Time Management Tools
The tools we will discuss are:
- Finding out how much your time is worth - Costing Your Time
- Making sure you concentrate on the right things - Deciding Work Priorities
- Checking how you really spend your time - Activity Logs
- Planning to solve a problem - Action Plans
- Tackling the right tasks first - Prioritized To Do Lists
- Deciding what your personal priorities should be - Personal Goal Setting
- Planning to make the best use of your time - Effective Scheduling
By the end of this section, you should have a much clearer understanding of how to use time to its greatest effect
