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Time Management Skills: Do Less Get More

Do you think time management tips are ideas to help you cram more into your day? Are you stressed out, exhausted, and irritable because you're working so hard? It's time for a time out. I hate to tell you this, but you're focusing on the wrong things. If you think you just need to figure out how to cram more in your day you've taken a wrong approach. You're focusing on efficiency.

When you're efficient you get things done in the least amount of time. It's good to be efficient, but efficiency isn't the only consideration for improved time management skills. You definitely want to develop ways to perform necessary and important tasks in less time.

Have you challenged yourself to determine if you should even be doing the things your spending so much time doing? Effectiveness is about doing the right things rather than doing the unimportant things fast. Those actions that produce the greatest results are th right things you should be very focused on. Effectiveness is about getting the most value from the time you have available. Your main focus should be on taking the actions that produce the greatest results with the least amount of action on your part. When you get caught up thinking you have to take care of a bunch of mundane details you wear yourself out drag yourself down and you have few results to show for all your hard work.

I've seen sales people in a slump spending inordinate amounts of time neatly organizing their client files and making meticulous notes when that time would have been much better spent focusing on how to make their next valuable contact. How often do you fritter away precious time on low value tasks? In addition to the obvious time wasters there are all those gray area tasks that seem productive, but they really aren't.

Are you more likely to produce results spending an hour cold calling strangers or attending a breakfast you're prospects are likely to attend? As you make better choices you begin to develop good time management skills. Most people confuse activity with results and suffer the consequences of those misguided choices.

You increase your effectiveness as you change your focus and priorities. Focus on the actions that produce the greatest results and let go of the low value activities. As you set your priorities for your actions you'll always have time for the actions with the highest value, and you'll never have time for unnecessary low value activities.

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About the author: Cheryl A. Clausen can help you get where you want to be. To find Time Management Tips get her free ecourse. Enhance your Time Management Skills, look here. Get your own completely unique content version of this article.

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