The Truth About Time Management. 3 Simple Ways to Double Your Productivity

One of the most important skills you can use in life to capitulate yourself to success is the skill of time management. We all have 24 hours in a day, and what we do in those 24 hours is the difference between failure and success. Nobody in the world gets 25 hours in a day. Therefore it is not a matter of can we manage time, but ourselves. After reading this article you will learn some simple methods and tricks that will double or even triple your productivity.

In today’s modern work and personal environment interruptions are our biggest stealers of time. We as a culture now all have ADD. Technology such as cell phones and email has left us in a reactive state, always accessible by other people. One study that showed once you get interrupted it takes approximately 22 minutes to get back on path. Another study said that the average American CEO does an average of 15 minutes of productive work a day due to constant interruptions. As humans, we are designed to work on one thing at a time, we are not meant to multitask. Knowing this you can immediately start to double your productivity by beginning to work in uninterrupted chunks of time for 50 minutes. Turn off the cell phone, shut down your email client, lock the door. You will be amazed at just how much you can get done in a 50 minute period with out interruptions.

The second problem that most people have is they confuse being busy with being productive, they are not the same. We all have a tendency to fall into the trap of doing things that are unimportant. The fix to this is simple. You need to gain an understanding of the big picture and see if what you are doing right now is fitting in. Let’s say that you want to make $100,000 dollars a year. Assuming that you work 8 hours a day, for 5 days a week, for the 1 year and take 2 weeks for vacation, you can very easily calculate how much your time is worth. Not including taxes your work time is $50/hour. Now you have reference, so you can ask yourself when your working is this a $50 a hour task? I don’t think that checking email is a $50 an hour task. Your next step is to begin to delegate the tasks that are not $50 an hour task and focus your time on the big money making activities.

The next recommendation is to begin to use a time management system. A simple pen and paper is all the tools that your really need. If you are not using a simple to-do list this will do wonders, start planning your days. Also begin to set up check list for all of the most common activities you do. You can also use a pen and paper to create a daily did sheet. This allows you to see what you did at the end of the day. From there you can see where you need to make improvements.

Learning how to manage ourselves is one of the most important skills that we can learn. I truly believe that if you begin to implements some of the strategies in this article that you will double or even triple your personal productivity.