Introduction
Why are you so bad at Time Management?
Time Audit
Planning
So what do you do first?
What do you do in which part of the day?
How do you stick to the plan?
Now Get Organised!
Delegation
Managing Meetings
Other Skills
Summary

INTRODUCTION
The problem with time management is that some of us are instinctively good at it and some of us are not. I, by the way, am not!

Now this wouldn't be a problem except, .. to be good in business you need to be good at managing your resources. And what is your most important resource? You guessed it... TIME.

Nothing gets done without time, no progress is made without time and having the right people, high quality unique products and an eager customer base would be of no value unless time is added to the equation. Time is instantly perishable and cannot be stored yet no business can be done without it.

So time is important. Time is also finite. Unlike other resources if you don't use it today you can't use it twice tomorrow to catch up.

Time has to be managed and the better you manage your time, the better you will manage yourself and your business.

Time management is of course, a misnomer. You cannot manage time, you can only manage your use of the resource. Time will go on whether you manage it or not and that's one of the problems. Left to it's own devices, the resource fades away and before you know it your three score years and ten are behind you and you're in extra time, if you are lucky.

It's never to late to start managing your time. Even if you have retired and you seem to have more than enough time on your hands, time management can provide opportunities and focus and help create a fulfilling life rather than a life that drifts from bowling green to soap opera then an early night.

A great way to bring this into focus is to ask yourself the following question: "If my doctor told me that I have only one day left to live how would I spend those 24 hours?"

Think about that for a while. Sobering isn't it? In my experience people start to think not only about what they would do but also and this often becomes the focus, what they wished they had done. Time management can help to solve this problem.

Science has been preoccupied with time for centuries. Unable to control it they have fixed their attention on at least understanding it.

Time played a major part in Einstein's theory of relativity and when asked about relativity he said "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it's only a minute. When you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours. That's relativity." Albert Einstein.

For those of us who can no longer attract the attention of a nice girl for two minutes let alone two hours, remember how fast time passes when you surf the Internet, play a TV game or watch a good movie. Compare that to the time it takes to wait for your husband to get home when he promised faithfully to be home by seven, or for your wife to get ready when you should have left ten minutes ago. The passing of time is certainly relative.

Einstein also came to the conclusion that time would pass slower out in space than it does here on earth. A space traveller who was away for 15 years would, when he arrived back on earth, be years younger than his twin brother. I wonder if I will live long enough to see that proved.

Stephen Hawking (today's time guru) in his "A Brief History of Time" suggests that the universe will only go on expanding for a finite period after which it will start to contract. During that contraction, time will, of course, go backwards. (of course!)

These differences in the passing of time may seem on the surface to have little to do with managing today's time but this is not the case. Time as a resource may have different values for different times of the day. The hour from 10 am to 11 am may be as much as three times as valuable as the hour between 1 pm and 2 pm.

Time management is not just about planning your day. Making the best use of the time resource is also about training yourself and others to work more effectively, balancing your time and having a clear idea of what you want to achieve.

Managing your time so that you can achieve more by using less, will not happen over night. ("It takes time to save time" Joe Taylor) If you work diligently through this work however, in a couple of weeks you will see a vast difference in the amount you are able to achieve and hopefully begin to accumulate that often sought after and seldom achieved commodity "Free Time".

In this unconventional look at Time Management we will explore why you are bad at Time Management, and how to get better. Planning your day / week / month and sticking to the plan. Prioritising, delegating and using all the tricks to make the most of your time.

Time is your most important resource. Manage it!