Control Your Day or Your Day Will Control You | Time Management

By ElliottRoberts
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Our days fly by so quickly that without a plan, it is easy to lose the value of them completely. All of the tasks we need to complete are easily neglected for things that pop up and grab our attention. When this happens too often, we are allowing the day to control us, when to be effective and successful we need to be in control of our days.

Spending time wisely naturally plays a big role in the level of success a person can achieve. You can read all the self help literature you want but without some sort of plan for your day, your day will simply "happen" to you. You will not accomplish much and you will miss out on new opportunities because you will be in such a constant state of being behind, that you will be out of time for anything else.

Your first step is to plan your day. Create a routine for writing down the tasks you need to complete for the day, as well as to set and review your goals. This could be at night before you go to bed or first thing in the morning.

Time management begins with planning your day. Set a time each day or the night before to think about what needs to be done that day. Schedule this time just like an appointment and stick to it every single day.

This will allow the eventual completion of the big project, as well as attention to all other matters of the day. Perhaps most importantly, you need to create routines. Your day planning itself should be a routine, as should all your small recurring tasks such as managing email, reading the news, and project implementation.

Break these bigger tasks down into several smaller tasks so that they can be finished a little at a time, while not consuming your whole day. Lastly, get into routines for your recurring daily tasks such as reading email, reading the news, working on projects, etc.

They usually only take a minute so handle them and move on. You will feel better, be more productive and suffer less stress. Much of your day can also be eaten up by over thinking the start of a new project.

Either finish it at the moment or schedule a more appropriate time and forget about it until then. Unless deeply focused on one project, handle as many as you can of the small, unexpected tasks as they come, rather than putting them off until later. This will prevent them from piling up and leaving you feeling overwhelmed.

About the Author

The Author, Elliott Roberts, writes for Becomng, a Personal Development blog that deals with topics from health to web applications. Read more Time Management articles here.

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