I recently completed my You 101 seminar, which takes a person through getting to know their true self.
This has many benefits including reducing stress, increasing decisiveness, improving relationships and more.
The one benefit I want to talk about today is that of Time Management.
For me time management is really simple, it comes down to knowing what you have to do and knowing what is important and what is urgent.
Think of it as a chart with important on one axis and urgent on the other:
This is a tool you can use to help determine where to best be spending your time.
It’s quite simple. Take a look at everything that’s on your plate at the moment and assign it to one of these four quadrants. How important and how urgent is it?
Once everything has been assigned now you can start to prioritize. What’s most urgent and most important – do that first. Next get the Urgent but not as important out of the way, then you can look at the stuff that’s not urgent and figure out how you want to plan your time to get it done before it becomes urgent.
Ideally you want to be living your life in the Important but Not Urgent area. Doing things that are important to you, but having lots of time to get them done so there is no stress.
Here’s the problem most people have though. They keep saying “Yes” to more things, even if they are a long way off, then finding that their time is consumed with things that aren’t really important to them and wonder how this happened.
The trick is knowing what is important to you and ONLY saying yes to those things.
This means you may have to start saying “No” to more things because you may start to realize that as much as it may be fun or it may be interesting it isn’t really calling to what you find important.
Once you’ve started saying “no” to more things you’ll find your time freeing up for things that are important and you can start saying “yes” to more of those things.
“But Rob,” you say, “how do I know what things are important?”
Well that’s where knowing yourself really deeply comes in. For most of us, we have a general sense of those things that are important and those that aren’t, but if you really want to have a clear picture you have to define your values and your purpose.
It’s amazing how many things in life come into focus when you know your values and your purpose.
I’ll probably be talking more about these in future posts, or you can come to one of the seminars I’ll be planning for the new year that deals with these things (they’re free).
So until the next time: keep laughing and saying yes and no.