Develop Excellent Time Management Skills

Written By Brian Tracy | Time Management | December 10th, 2010 | 28 Comments »

The starting point of becoming excellent in time management is desire. Almost everyone feels that their time management skills could be vastly better than they are.

People resolve, over and over again, to get serious about time management by focusing, setting better priorities and overcoming procrastination. They intend to get serious about time management sometime, but unfortunately, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Organizational Skills Require Motivation

The key to motivation is “motive.”

For you to develop sufficient desire to develop time management and organizational skills, you must be intensely motivated by the benefits you feel you will enjoy. You must want the results badly enough to overcome the natural inertia that keeps you doing things the same old way.

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If everyone agrees that excellent time management is a desirable skill, why is it that so few people can be described as “well organized, effective and efficient?” Over the years, I have found that many people have ideas about time management that are simply not true.

But if you believe something to be true, it becomes true for you. Your beliefs cause you to see yourself and the world, and your relationship to time management, in a particular way. If you have negative beliefs in any area, these beliefs will affect your thinking and actions, and will eventually become your reality. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”

The first myth of time management, or negative belief, is that if you are too well organized, you become cold, calculating and unemotional. If you are extremely effective and efficient, some people feel that they will lose their spontaneity and freedom. They will become unable to “go with the flow,” to express themselves openly and honestly.

People think that managing your time well makes you too rigid and inflexible.

This turns out not to be true at all. Many people hide behind this false idea and use it as an excuse for not disciplining themselves the way they know they should. The fact is that people who are disorganized are not spontaneous; they are merely confused, and often frantic.

Often they suffer a good deal of stress. It turns out that the better organized you are, the more time and opportunity you have to be truly relaxed, truly spontaneous, and truly happy. You have a much greater internal locus of control.

Here is the key: Structure and organize everything that you possibly can. Think ahead, plan for contingencies, prepare thoroughly, and focus on specific results. Only then can you be completely relaxed and spontaneous when the situation changes.

The better organized you are in the factors that are under your control, the greater freedom and flexibility you have to quickly make changes whenever they are necessary.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 10th, 2010 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Time Management.