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Do you feel in control of how you spend your time? Why is it important to manage your time?
Time management is one of the most important life skills you can develop. Some of the benefits of time management include increased productivity, better focus, and most importantly, work-life balance. However, many people let external factors dictate how they spend their time.
With this in mind, here’s a look at the benefits of time management.
Time Management Leads to a Balanced Life
Most people’s biggest source of dissatisfaction and unhappiness in life is the imbalance they feel between their different roles and responsibilities. Many people feel their work demands so much of them that there aren’t enough hours in the day to give adequate time, energy, and attention to their families. Or they’re just barely keeping up with family and work, but have no personal time for their own rest and rejuvenation, so they feel burnt out.
According to Stephen Covey, the author of First Things First, the feeling of being constantly pulled in different directions stems from the either/or paradigm of thinking about time: You either devote the next hour to work or to family, but not to both. The either/or paradigm is largely part of Western culture and contributes to a scarcity, win/lose “chronos” mentality that there’s only limited time and time spent in one role is always at the expense of another.
But in reality, the person who goes to work and brainstorms in meetings is the same person who cooks dinner at home and helps the kids with homework. Furthermore, all your roles are part of your interrelated whole person, so who you are in each role impacts who you are in all your other roles.
However, when you manage your time well in advance, you can strike a balance between all your roles, needs, and responsibilities and make sure that nothing gets neglected.
TITLE: First Things First
AUTHOR: Stephen R. Covey
TIME: 51
READS: 29.8
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BOOK_SUMMARYURL: first-things-first-summary-stephen-covey
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Spending Time With Your Loved Ones
Many people complain that they don’t have enough time with their family because work responsibilities consume both their time and energy. However, spending time with your loved ones should be everyone’s priority. In fact, working too much and not spending enough time with loved ones is one of the five most common regrets of the dying.
Furthermore, your relationships with your children and partner are unique strengths. Only you can parent (not babysit) your own children in your unique way; for example, you might be able to foster your kids’ love of the outdoors because you also love the outdoors, whereas your partner can’t foster that passion in the same way because they prefer being inside. And only you can invest time in your partnership.
By managing your time well in advance, you can make sure that your work responsibilities don’t eat away at your time with your loved ones. To that end, productivity expert Laura Vanderkam (168 Hours), recommends adjusting your work schedule so that you work in chunks (like from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m.) instead of throughout the entire workday (from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.). By chunking your workday, you’ll work the same number of hours but gain free time to spend with your loved ones.
Avoiding Procrastination
If you don’t allocate your time in advance, you can delude yourself into thinking that you have more time than you actually do to attend to everything. As a result, you may fall into the trap of procrastination. In the short term, procrastination wastes your time and gives you anxiety. In the long term, however, it has more overarching and deleterious effects, hurting your mental health and causing you to miss out on opportunities to progress in life.
In her book Procrastination, psychologists Lenora Yuen and Jane Burka highlight some of the negative effects of procrastination:
- First, it leads you to perform poorly on tasks. Procrastinators often save tasks for the last minute or miss deadlines altogether, leading to poor performance at work and school.
- Second, procrastination causes you to miss important opportunities. Procrastinators often delay life-improving decisions, such as switching to a better career.
- Third, procrastination strains your relationships. When procrastinators delay chores, assignments, and decisions, they frustrate and disappoint their colleagues, friends, and family.
- Fourth, procrastination compromises your physical health. Procrastinators’ health suffers when they avoid exercise, fail to plan healthy meals, and postpone doctor visits.
- Finally, procrastination hurts your self-esteem and mental health. Many procrastinators feel guilt and shame about their tendencies, which degrades their self-esteem and mental health.
Proper time management can help you avoid falling into the procrastination trap and avoid, or at least, minimize these effects.
Final Words
The benefits of time management cannot be underestimated. When you manage your time effectively, you don’t have to sacrifice one area to succeed in another. Furthermore, you can avoid falling into the trap of procrastination, which not only leads to anxiety and hinders your performance but can also cause you to miss out on important opportunities in life.
If you enjoyed our article about the benefits of time management, check out the following suggestions for further reading:
We feel constantly pressed for time. We feel we have to do it all. But because we’re going in so many directions, we make little progress in any of them. Yet most of these activities are trivial. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism puts it, we’re majoring in minor activities. The way out of this trap is to practice essentialism: “do less but better.” McKeown explains how you can distinguish the vital few from the trivial, then eliminate the nonessentials and make your optimum contribution in your life and work.
While many business books tell you how to manage other people, this 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker explains how to manage yourself to be effective. Drucker says anyone can learn five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making a unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. He explains how to implement these practices, which have remained relevant for over 50 years, even as technology and organizations have evolved.
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