The Importance of Time Management In Our Lives

In our busy lives, time management skills have become necessarily important but there are many who don’t know how to manage their time. There is an oft repeated saying, ‘If you want to make sure that something gets done, give it to someone who is busy.’ There is a reason for this belief.

Those who are busy realize the importance of making every moment count so they can accomplish all they want to do in a day. Those who are not busy feel they have all the time in the world to get done the few things they are required to do so will often waste their time and as a result become procrastinators, accomplishing nothing and wondering where their day went. They believe that there will be a lot of time to do it tomorrow so there is no need to hurry with things today.

For those who tend to be procrastinators, it will be necessary for them to set goals, to organize, to prioritize, to schedule and to make plans based on what needs to be done. It will be necessary to prioritize each task and to determine what time they have available for each particular job. To help them do this, they can make use of calendars, daytimers, appointment books or lists.

I am a strong advocate of lists and make use of daily, monthly and yearly ones. My mother always accused me of spending more time making my lists up than accomplishing the tasks on them. This is a common excuse used by non-list makers for not using lists. However, I do get many more things accomplished each day than my non-list maker friends and acquaintances do.

Those who criticize list-makers claim that we don’t get everything done on our lists; that we often just put things over to the next day – especially if we don’t really want to do them. But if it had never been put on the list in the first place, it wouldn’t have gotten done any faster if we hadn’t wanted to do it in the first place.

Although I believe strongly in the advantages of lists, I would suggest that they be not too vague. For example, instead of putting ‘do family room’, as I once did on my yearly ‘to do list’, I broke it down into separate segments of paint, replace carpeting and replace window coverings, each item would have been off the list much more quickly than the total ‘do family room’ item.

When a completed task is crossed off the list, there is always a great sense of
satisfaction. There would be no such feeling of complete accomplishment if there was no such list. With a list, you can see at a glance what has been done, what still has to be done and where little jobs can be fit into smaller segments of time and bigger jobs done when more time is available.

Practicing time management will allow most of us with busy schedules to have more time to do those things which we really enjoy doing.