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Time Management Tips: Which of These Mistakes are You Making?

Effective time management skills are based on your goals and integrity with yourself. How often do you find yourself going off on tangents, reacting rather than proactively planning, and spending hours on non-productive low value activities? If you're making these mistakes they are costing you precious time and keeping you from getting results. You don't take off on tangents because you just want to waste a lot of time and energy. It happens because you don't have a clear direction for where you're going and what you want to accomplish. You may have an idea of what you want, but you haven't really mapped it out, so to speak, so you know what your next steps should be.

When you respond immediately to other people and circumstances you are choosing to allow these people and circumstance to control your destiny. Responding reactively keeps you from following your plan, so your really following someone else's plan or no plan at all. You can't get what you want when you don't have a plan and you allow other people and circumstances to change your plans based on their wants and needs.

It's a whole lot easier to get caught up dong non-productive low value things than it is to do the real work that people are willing to pay you for. Consequently it feels more comfortable to yourself to get involved in these things. You look and feel busy and like you're really doing something, but you aren't. You have to hold yourself accountable for being productive. Doing so will not only improve your time management skills, but it will help you to get the results you want too. To get results you have to set goals. The goals you set must must involve the actual actions you will take. Free up time for yourself by taking action and then moving immediately to the next action. As you get more done in less time the amount of free time you have increases.

But when you don't hold yourself accountable for actually taking the actions you're out of integrity with yourself. The more frequently you do this the harder it is to maintain integrity and get things done. Because even while you're planning to take action your thoughts are on the fact that you didn't do it when you said you would before, so you probably won't do it now.

Going off on tangents and automatically reacting happens because you lack focus. You lack focus because you don't have a clear plan. And because you don't have a clear plan you don't know what the right actions are, so you can't take the right actions.

You have poor time management skills because you have a poor time management mindset. You make excuses for yourself or place blame rather than accepting that it's always your decision to take action or avoid action. Start working on changing your mindset so you can become a time efficient person. That means that you will need to become a person who follows their plan and who takes action.

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About the author: Cheryl A. Clausen can help you get where you want to be. Great Time Management Tips get her free ecourse. Improve your Time Management Skills, check this out. You can get a unique content version of this article.

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