Goals and Productivity are like peanut butter and jelly

Goal setting and time management belong together.

To achieve goals, it’s important to manage your time well. To manage your time well, you must know what your goals are. They are intimately inter-connected, yet few books address these two processes together.

Setting goals is the first step in time management. The next step is to figure out how to spend your time so that you are making progress toward your goals.

The nature of time.

Time is elusive. We attempt to measure it with clocks and watches, but cannot save it up for another day. Each day, we all receive the same amount of time. It can easily slip through our fingers despite good intentions, a treasure stolen away by procrastination, interruptions, and indecision.

Managing time is really about managing activities, spaces, and information. Spaces include physical areas like our homes, offices and desks and the objects within them. There are four ways to manage time:

• Evaluate – assess the value
• Simplify – delete, decrease, declutter
• Be more effective – do the right job
• Be more efficient – do the job right

Each day 24 hours is credited to our account. We all have fixed time expenses such as working, eating and sleeping. Usually there is some discretionary time each day as well, that we have more choice in spending. A well-balanced time budget includes time for yourself and time for those you love. You can monitor your time to evaluate if you are spending it well, and make adjustments if necessary. Learn more at Time Management 101, a tutorial for increasing productivity.

“The only true measure of what you believe is what you do, not what you say.” –Brian Tracy

About dailyplanit

I seek to create order from the chaos of complex information. Join me at the Daily PlanIt to gain insights, inspiration, and information to increase skills for a better life. I unlock the power of teaching reading with phonics in the pursuit of literacy at www.phonicspow.com. In my spare time I explore books and movies, often choosing titles available on both screen and page.