Time Management Training Is Essential for Success

Living a successful life requires that you actively engage all aspects of yourself, but if you're always running around putting out fires and living in chaos success may seem impossible. Learning time management skills will not only help you with your career successes but also your personal life successes. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to be successful, but you do need to understand a few factors about time:

It's a limited resource -- Many things are limited, but nothing is more limited than time. No matter what you do you only have a finite amount of time in each day, and in your very life.

It won't come back -- You can't get back lost time. It's simply gone forever.

It can be managed -- You can use this limited resource better by managing your time responsibly.

Realizing that time is limited, and you can't get it back, but it can be managed, should be a huge motivating factor to make you want to learn time management techniques and implement them in your daily life as well as in your career. When you are efficient at managing your time, suddenly you will have the ability to implement your fresh ideas at work, spend uninterrupted time with friends and family, and truly capture every moment of pleasure from your life.

Time management skills can lessen your stress exponentially because you will be able to streamline your days. Sure, you'll get off track on occasion, but it won't be as upsetting because you'll be able to experience more days without stress. Stress is a condition that builds on itself, and if you don't get some relief, it just piles up until it breaks you down physically or emotionally. Allowing periodic reprieves from stress can make it easier to deal with stressors as they happen because it won't be a constant condition of your life. This is the difference between living in a survival or thriving mode.

You can strive to thrive by:

Identifying priorities -- Priorities are the things that matter most to you and enhance your life. It could be spending time with family, having a pleasant workplace, leading a healthy lifestyle, or any number of important things. Priorities are also the way you order tasks and manage your schedule. You should have a list of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly priorities at work. Put these in your work calendar first, then work backwards inputting tasks that you must accomplish each day to meet your top priorities. At home you also have priorities which can be organized. Maybe a priority is to eat dinner at the table three nights a week with the entire family. Schedule this and stick to it.

Setting goals -- Instead of just thinking about goals, write them down just like the priorities above, working backwards by scheduling in tasks that will help you reach your goal. Set only one big long-term goal at a time, which will translate into several short-term goals, which will become daily tasks. The most important part of goal setting is to set goals that matter, that you have a desire to achieve, and a commitment to do the work necessary for attainment.

Creating schedules -- Each day you should have a written schedule of events, goals, and tasks to complete that will help you reach your objectives. You can keep this on a paper calendar, or a computerized calendar it's up to you.

Life without priorities, goals, and schedules is a life of chaos, stress, and merely survival, and none of those conditions breed success. So hop to it. Identify your priorities, set goals, and schedule yourself to thrive.