Achieve your goals through time management

Time management is one of the most effective skills, and it significantly influences your professional and personal life. We all know that time is one of the most scarce and valuable resources, which can’t be wasted.

If you are adequately using your time to be productive, you will retain your time for work. When you constantly waste time, you can’t achieve your goals. Time doesn’t discriminate against anyone based on age, religion, gender, or income.

A poor guy has the same amount of time as a rich guy. We are given a fixed time; however, some manage to make the most of it, and others waste it. Only when you realize how important time is can you be genuinely motivated to work harder to acquire good time management.

So, the only difference between a successful man and someone struggling at work or life is the different approach towards time and its management.

If you want to change the way you manage your time, start by setting the right goals for yourself, so you can work towards achieving them. Along with goals, you must also identify your routine and point out what time-wasting activities you indulge in.

When you identify all the bad habits causing you to be less productive, you can start working on quitting them. You can do just that and much more by using Week Plan.

Most people struggle with good time management skills, and less than 20% of people can achieve goals through proper time management; it’s up to you which side you want to be on.

Why do you need Time Management and Goal Setting?

Time management tools such as Week Plan, you will set your goals according to what you want to accomplish in a given amount of time. If your goals are too generic, no time management system can help you.

You need to set specific goals so you can focus on the task at hand before moving on to the next goal achievement. For example, if your task is to send emails, instead of setting a vague goal, try to divide the number of emails based on dates so you can work on it more timely and effectively.

Breaking vague goals into smaller and specific ones helps accomplish goals within a specified time.

Goal setting and time management can help you in goal achievement and get the desired success in less time. The most significant advantage you can reap is that you will no longer check the clock compulsively because you will be busy following your goals.

In this situation, the clock will become an instrument that can keep you on track to complete your tasks within the available time.

Another reason you need goal setting and time management in your life is that these two can’t be separated. You can’t effectively use time management unless you have goals set for yourself.

Having proper goals in place, you won’t have much to wander around time wasters; instead, you will stay focused on reaching the deadline according to the goals set.

1. Identify Important Goals

Just taking on goals isn’t going to help your time management. Your goals must be achievable as well. If you are taking on too many projects at a time, the goals will be cluttered, and instead of helping you to work faster and achieve better productivity, it will only derail you from your attempts to follow a time management system based on goals.

It would help if you choose which goals are attainable and discard goals that are unimportant and cause you to be unproductive. For instance, when you’re working, stay on the goals related to work rather than your weekend activities.

You must understand the difference between goals and activities. Goals are essential for your career success; however, activities help make the job easier. Activities don’t have much impact on the success of your career; therefore, try to finish the goals first before moving on to different activities.

Identify Important Goals Through Good Time Management Skills

2. SMART Goal Setting

The SMART process is a way to quantify and set your goals according to priority and urgency. If you follow this process religiously, it will become a part of your daily time management routine. Let’s look at what the SMART process is made up of:

  • S – (Specific goals): Decide what goals you want to work on and how you want to reach them. Goals must be specific and not vague to boost the time management process instead of halting it. Try to give goals-specific identification, such as the number of invoices to send in a day, etc.
  • M – (Measurable goals): Your goals should be measurable. A good practice for setting goals is to give them a time frame or time slot during which you aim to reach your goals. It is an essential part of time management.
  • A – (Attainable goals): Sometimes, we get carried away and take on goals that are too broad or too much to be completed. To avoid this, you must break down goals into small achievable tasks that you know are attainable and can help in task completion.
  • R – (Realistic goals): Keeping the human limitations in mind, make goals for yourself that are realistic and can be achieved within time with a good amount of dedication.
  • T – (Time frame for goals): It is also essential to give yourself enough time to complete your goals. If you give yourself too little or too much time, you will lose the purpose of time management.

If you follow these rules of the SMART system when it comes to goals, you will achieve goals from the time management system. Once it becomes a part of your routine, it won’t feel like an extra effort.

3. Work towards the Main Goal

If you have one main goal too big to handle, a good practice is to break it down into chunks or a series of goals. This series of goals should look like an organizational chart. The small goals help in achieving the task of the main goal.

It is easier to set a series of smaller goals that lead to your main goal or goals. A series of goals should look like an organizational chart. The process of achieving your goals should begin with the most critical tasks, and then you can take care of smaller, less essential tasks.

You should prioritize the main tasks based on the importance of achieving your goals and then get to the job of looking after smaller or easier goals.

Making goals part of your time management program is easier when you write your goals down and then write things off as you complete them.

Best Tips for Time Management

Entrepreneurs are prime examples of individuals who can manage time properly and get enough work done with a limited amount of time. They can balance their work and their personal lives without feeling overwhelmed with work.

If you constantly push yourself to limits and expect things to happen in time, they won’t happen. You need to acquire the art of maintaining some semblance of balance because life isn’t all about work; you need to have some quality of life to maintain a balance between work and life.

Work-life Balance is essential in your life, and unless you start taking care of your time, you will always be stressed. Try to effectively juggle your responsibilities so that you can work better and also prioritize your family time. People, who continue their life without proper balance, reach their saturation point faster, and this is where everything starts to fall apart.

Sometimes, little things like walking in the park or just sitting outside while listening to music can be good stress relievers. These activities might seem like nothing, but it can help you in achieving that semblance of balance that you need in your life, so find some time for yourself.

Let’s look into some vital time management tips for you to get the job done on time. Life isn’t very long, and you cannot afford to be stressed all the time. What’s more important, these little things will help you reach your bigger goals.

1. Choose the Right Goals

With everything in life, there’s a right way to do things, and then there’s a wrong way. Similarly, there are the right ways to achieve goals that we should set in the right way – it could be locking the correct targets and staying on track.

There are unlimited benefits to setting the right goals – the essential being it helps to keep track of your work. We already discussed the best goal-setting method, known as SMART goals, to help you select the right choice and be more productive.
Choose the Right Goals Through Time Management Tools

2. Deciding on a Time Management System

Another tip for managing your time properly is to adopt a sound time management system. You can prioritize your tasks with a Week Plan based on their urgency and importance. Week Plan can help you do wonders with your limited time; once you get the hang of it, the sky’s the limit.

You can also prioritize the tasks for your personal life so you stay in control of your work and life. Save the least essential tasks and ones that are the least time-consuming for later; once you finish your important tasks on time, you will automatically have enough time to focus on the unimportant ones.

3. Audit your time for seven days straight.

Auditing can help you locate problematic areas when it comes to time management. It can help you identify the hours when you are at maximum productivity and the activities you do that are time-consuming. You can either record online or in a journal with a time difference of 30 minutes or an hour.

After recording, check what you did and how much you worked productively towards your task. If you feel like you didn’t spend the time well enough, see what activity caused you to lose time. If you audit yourself like this for a whole week, the results might be shocking for me, and you would be able to work towards making your time more valuable and productive.

4. Focus on the most important tasks

It is essential to focus on your most important tasks in the morning as most people are at their maximum productivity.

If you have two or three tasks for the morning, start by doing the most significant task first. After you finish the enormous task, you can focus on the smaller ones. Your high productivity level can be critical to overall performance, and the time taken to completing tasks will also be minimized.

5. Follow the 80-20 rule.

There are many ways to achieve your goals; however, the 80-20 rule or the Pareto Principle is an excellent way to be effective at time management. According to this rule, you put out 80% effort to gain 20% of the results.

If we translate this into sales lingo, 80% of the sales come from 20% of the customers. It is easy to scale through this tip; you need to identify the 20% of the efforts that give you 80% of the results.

Follow the 80-20 rule for goal acheivement

6. Instill keystone habits into your life.

According to a poll, around 31% of people admitted wasting time from 30 minutes to an hour a day. This is because we have certain habits that continuously waste our time and make us unproductive.

When you try to instill keystone habits, not only do you gain new good habits, but you also remove those habits which are bad for you. If you master habit development, your overall time management will also be better.

7. Schedule email response times.

Try to limit your time over emails because it is easier to get distracted with so many emails pouring in simultaneously. Try to turn emails off and only dedicate specific time to emails so you can only read and reply to them in that time frame.

Indeed, if something is urgent and important, people will call or text you. If you’re reading emails in the middle of work, your thought process is compromised, and it becomes harder to get back to the same level of productivity.

Final Words

Now that you know the importance of time management and how it is essential to reach your goals, it’s time to take action. Regain control of your time and life to succeed in your career and live a happy life.

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