Why Time Management Matters
Episode #1 of the course Efficient time management by Chris Croft
Welcome to this course on Time Management!
You can hardly find a more important subject, since your life is only the time you have. So, the most important questions like, “What do I want to do with my life?” and, “How can I do all the things I want to do? or, “How can I achieve more?” and maybe even, “How can I be happier?” — they all come back to Time Management. I’ve been training people on this subject for 20 years, and I’ve got some great answers for you in this 10-day course.
The Two Levers
You only have two levers you can pull that make any difference to what happens to you each day: how you spend your money and how you spend your time. And the Money lever is much smaller than the Time one! This is because most of your money is already committed to living costs, and how you use the little remaining money won’t affect your happiness or achievement that much. But your time is yours every day to choose how you spend it. Of course, some of your time is already committed to your boss and to everyday chores, but you still have a chunk of time every day that you can use, and this is what Time Management is all about.
Why Time Management Is Difficult
Time Management is difficult for two reasons. One is that it can be tricky to balance the present and the future: We ideally want to have fun now but also have success in the future, and in order to have success in the future, we might have to forgo some fun in the present. But not all of it! The other reason is that other people are trying to use your time to achieve their agendas; things that are important to them may not be important to you.
The Objective of Time Management
The objective of Time Management is to maximize the time you spend on important things. YOU decide what’s important—it should be whatever makes you happy and gives you a sense of achievement. Some people go for only happiness or only achievement, but I would recommend you aim for a bit of both. Some people aim for achievement at work and happiness outside work, but I recommend you aim for both at both—to enjoy both your work and your life outside and to get a sense of achievement not only from your work but also from the things you do outside it. We will return to this in a bit more detail in Lesson 7. For now, let’s agree that the important activities to you are those that make you happy or contribute to something you want to achieve.
But how can you maximize the time you spend on important things, bearing in mind that the amount of time you have is fixed? The only way to do that is to minimize the time you spend on UNimportant things. And there are just five ways you can reduce the time you spend on unimportant things, and I will be telling you about each one in the next five chapters.
See you tomorrow!
Homework: Make two lists. One list should be of the things you would like to spend more time on, and the other list should be the things you spend too much time on, what you know you should really reduce time doing. You can use this second list as we progress through the coming lessons in order to get more time to spend on the things in that first list.
Recommended book
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch
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