Time Management – How To Cut Your Workweek By 5 Hours
In today's work environment most everyone believes that they are stressing because they simply don't have enough time in the day to get their work done. The truth is though, with one simple time management trick they can gain at least an hour a day.
The term time management is really misleading because you can't manage time. What you can manage is the way you use it. Your behavior and your allocation of the 9 or 10 hours that you are assigned each day to get your work done depends on just how work does get done.
According to a recent study, we have all become junkies to a particular type of technology that is robbing precious minutes from each of us each day. That technology is email.
Email, and worse yet chat and IM, have become major distractions. Not every email has to be responded to immediately and not all IM messages have to happen right now. Of course those applications will encourage you to believe just the opposite with handy little envelopes appearing as new mail arrives and IM applications that pop up when somebody wants to chat.
There are obviously important emails sent but do they have to be answered immediately? Another type of mail also takes up your time and that's the opt ins that you have to newsletters, forum notifications and the like. These not only take up time but take you off track. Limit your opt ins to only those that have real value.
Assuming that you check your email every 15 minutes (and most junkies check it far more often than that) and you spend 5 minutes reading and responding, you could shave an hour a day off that activity simply by checking every 90 minutes instead. That's 5 hours a week and that is a significant time savings.
If the temptation to answer the prompt icons is simply to great to ignore…close the application. Restart it every 90 minutes and you be well on your way to establishing an effective time management habit.
The term time management is really misleading because you can't manage time. What you can manage is the way you use it. Your behavior and your allocation of the 9 or 10 hours that you are assigned each day to get your work done depends on just how work does get done.
According to a recent study, we have all become junkies to a particular type of technology that is robbing precious minutes from each of us each day. That technology is email.
Email, and worse yet chat and IM, have become major distractions. Not every email has to be responded to immediately and not all IM messages have to happen right now. Of course those applications will encourage you to believe just the opposite with handy little envelopes appearing as new mail arrives and IM applications that pop up when somebody wants to chat.
There are obviously important emails sent but do they have to be answered immediately? Another type of mail also takes up your time and that's the opt ins that you have to newsletters, forum notifications and the like. These not only take up time but take you off track. Limit your opt ins to only those that have real value.
Assuming that you check your email every 15 minutes (and most junkies check it far more often than that) and you spend 5 minutes reading and responding, you could shave an hour a day off that activity simply by checking every 90 minutes instead. That's 5 hours a week and that is a significant time savings.
If the temptation to answer the prompt icons is simply to great to ignore…close the application. Restart it every 90 minutes and you be well on your way to establishing an effective time management habit.
