Time management is a part of an individual learning experience in living with other people and in facing all the changes in one's surroundings. Time is constant: It is always 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week (24/7). Nevertheless, the usage of time varies among each individual. There are people who can give time the capacity to control their lives, and there are people who find themselves a "slave" of time.
However, you can change the way you use time, and prepare yourself for better or worse circumstances. Here are the necessary pre-requisites to help you manage your time:
1. Think of goals and aims as necessary achievements.These achievements or aims can be reached by becoming realistic and by knowing your directions. Think of the scenarios of success but you should also recognize the fact that these roads have to be traversed in a given time.
2. Think of the time frame in achieving goals and aims.Time frames are the periods you are giving yourself to finish a task. If you are to write a book or an article, consider the time you are giving yourself for this activity. However, since you are also doing other things, you cannot devote your entire time in doing the said endeavor. Finally, think of the flow of things or the movement of time in your daily life as you move forward in achieving your desired goals. Think of your other activities that might affect the time factor in finishing given tasks. You might be spending too much time on a very idle activity (like too many late night parties or soirées or a whole day in front of your computer playing online games) that will give you less time to go on with your plan towards self-fulfillment and success.
3. Be realistic and expect changes.Time Management involves flexibility and open-mindedness. Do not expect that you can finish a task in what you've considered as your time frame unless everything is laid down perfectly. Maximize your time by examining your errors and by moving on with solutions that will sustain whatever efforts you have given to traverse difficult situations and challenges.
4. Know your work style. You work with your habits, your cycles, and bodily rhythms. Know how fast you can work on things. And if it's not as good as others, try to make some developments. Examine yourself and know how fast you can work on things, like typing or encoding words in a computer, filing office data, writing a term paper, or even reading a book. You don't need to know the exact time but at least, you will have an approximate measurement of how long you can finish such task.
5. Know your environment or workplace.Your house has a time of its own, your office has schedules, and your neighborhood has activities to offer. You are surrounded by these time schedules. It would be better if you would be conscious of the time flow in your surroundings. The daily tasks in your house are definitely main factors in determining your personal time. More so, your working hours are defined by the nature of your work and your workplace. The activities by the people around you may affect your strategies and daily endeavors. Finally, you are not alone in your workplace and other people are also wary of their time and schedules. All of these would affect your time frames and you must be in-synched with all of these to manage your limited time hassle-free.
6. Plan.Planning, like in any other preparations, is a way of saving time for errors. Mistakes usually happen because of unexpected and unforeseen factors such as wrong estimates of resources or the entry of new variables in solving a problem. However, with the proper plan and preparation, these unforeseen circumstances can be expected as well as minimized. In such way, you may still finish the task in a given time.
By considering the above-mentioned factors, you are not only giving yourself a period to reflect on how time flows in your life. You are also recognizing the factor that affects time and its fluidity.
