Time Management to Personal Effectiveness

Meetings Waste Valuable Time, Talents, and Money

Time management is one of the most over used phrases today. Everyone seems to have a problem with time. However, time can't be an issue because nobody can manage time.

How many times in a day do you complain about your inability to manage time? How often do you yearn for better time management tips? If managing time is your focus, I assure you you are losing the battle. Turn from time management to personal effectiveness improvement, and learn to manage priorities.

It is crucial you understand your central issue is not time management but personal lifestyle management. Mull over this. You must learn to set and carry out goals and plans, and learn to work with priorities. But, most of all, you must try to attend only meaningful meetings. Yes, meaningful meetings. We waste too much time in meetings. We must put time and effort to making meetings meaningful. As well we must learn to control our behavior and not allow emails, Facebook, and the internet to lead our activities. They are seductive!

No doubt you are stressed from rushing from one meeting to another; and often you are late. Like many people, you are suffering from chronic lateness and hurry sickness. Probably, your reputation is tarnished by your frequent lateness. Still, you rush about directionless. Chronic, frequent lateness seeps into your life, and you accept it because you blame time, or rather a lack of time. You believe that this hurry sickness state will pass when you learn to manage time. Wake up! You cannot manage time.

Managing God's Time

How many time management seminars have you attended? Have they helped your personal effectiveness? Are you frustrated because folks continue to demand your presence—your wife, husband, children, boss, pastor? Will it ever end? Maybe not, but don't despair, each person has the same challenge to different degrees. We can't do everything we want done and others want us to do each day. The key is folks with more resources aren't able to accomplish more in the 24 hour day.

Michel's book, Managing God's Time: Personal Effectiveness Improvement, presents trustworthy principles, tips, tools, techniques, to help you set priorities and handle daily challenges in each 24 hours. It stresses the obvious: You can't manage time, manage your personal effectiveness — focus on priorities and remove these useless phrases from your vocabulary and your life:

  • I am too busy ...
  • I don't have enough time ...
  • I can't do this ...
  • I wish I were like ...
  • I can't work within a budget ...

Start Working With Priorities

To emphasize you cannot manage time and you must manage priorities, Michel developed the P-Squares Decision Process. It is a key tool. It will help you un-balance your life and focus on right priorities to improve your personal effectiveness, and stop yearning for time management tips. Priorities deal with the important. Priorities lead you away from the urgent to conquer stress. Through working with priorities, you will develop an attitude to life that rejects the victim mentality that blames others, including a lack of time, for your ineffectiveness.

Focus on Goal Setting

You can start today to manage your effectiveness by learning to set goals to do identified priorities. Drop the urgent, pick up the important, and focus on right priorities. Do you believe? Work with goals which are clear, complete, concise, calculable (4C). A goal needs a plan otherwise it's useless. The paln is the steps to do the goal and should be specific, simple, staged, sensitive to people (4S). Without a plan you will be lost. Even so, there is more.

Time Management Means Working With A Spending Plan

Time management jargon points to To Do lists with different forms and tools to classify these lists. But usually, these lists exclude a time spending plan that shows how much time you will need to do different items you plan to do each day. As well, that execution plan will show clearly the need to plan not to do items. That's a key activity: Deciding what you won't do because time is limited—time is fixed. It is a limited resource.

Often, we set a goal, do a plan, but do not estimate the cost in time, so we run late, chronically late. We think of a spending plan only in money terms. However, it is essential that after the goal and plan, you allocate a spending plan for expected time and talents needed to do the goal. This will indicate early, if you might need to defer priorities because you allocated too many projects in available time. Daily, understand that you have 24 hours only, which are more than enough to do what you need to do. The question to answer is this: How much time do you allow the Internet, emails, and other gadgets to keep you occupied?

Build Reserve Time Daily

However, it does not end with the goal, plan, and spending plan. While identifying and allocating the time needed for your tasks, build in reserve time, a buffer, a margin, to allow for the unforeseen. The unexpected is normal each day. You might not know what they will be, but you know you will have to deal with unplanned events. That is why you must build reserve time in your daily time spending plan.

Reserve time is not a panacea to do the goal on time. Reserve time is that buffer that will help to reduce stress, look at different alternatives objectively, and one way to help improve your personal effectiveness, that's what time management is about, improving personal effectiveness.

Reject Deflection Speech

You can conquer the seductive pull to blame a lack of time for your ineffectiveness only by recognizing and rejecting deflection speech. People seem comfortable with deflection speech, such as, my sweater is too small, instead of, I shrunk my sweater in the laundry, or, I have no time, instead of, I have not managed my priorities well. Deflection speech encourages the victim mentality — Stop; it is harmful to your health

We over commit ourselves, we under-deliver, and we blame a lack of time. Generally, we don't see the central issue: lack of planning and execution — certainly not a lack of time. Will you accept you cannot manage time? Will you accept responsibility for working in the 24-hour day that God gives you?

Managing 24 Hours

Time is fixed and we must learn to manage our expectations of what can be accomplished within our day. Not everyone has access to the same resources that might make it easier to accomplish many tasks daily. We can change our attitudes by focusing on what we can do within our set time. We can take responsibility for our time spent but systemic barriers can still prevent us from accomplishing all that we hope to. Resources need to be available so that we can accomplish all that we need or want to. Fixed tasks like household maintenance and childcare can greatly impact how much time we have to manage to accomplish our goals, so we must seek out and demand that resources to assist with the necessary tasks be made available to all.

The next step on the journey away from the time management attitude is accepting who we are and not who others want us to become. We don't have to look like that person with the perfect figure in the infomercial trying to convince us to buy the stuff she is selling. Let us accept who we are ans the level playing of 24 hours daily.