Main Principles of Time Management – Planning, Checking, Organizing!

  • Tomasz Celler
  • July 1, 2017
  • 3 min read

It’s time to continue our previous post and present yet another three very important principles of Time Management. Learning and mastering these rules will turn us into a person with an active approach to time. It means, that you will be able to easily focus on your work, have your tasks under control, and plan everything in advance.

So, without further introductions, let us discuss the remaining three of the six main principles of time management. 

Planning

Those, who focus on the future, have no problem with planning. Having all planned ahead of time significantly increases our chances of success. We know where to go, what to do, and how to do it. However, one must remember that there is a huge gap between having a plan and bringing it into effect.

While plans are not the guarantee of a success, or even more, they tend to fail quite often, the activity of preparing them is very important. It gets you ready for the action. Even if the situation is not going the way you wanted it to go, you are still prepared, and you know exactly what your goal is. Without planning, you have a medium chance to successfully complete the task even if everything goes the best possible way, and very small chances to finish it if the circumstances are not in your favor. And, unfortunately, they usually aren’t.

Try to take into consideration the possible obstacles, and when you plan, always leave yourself a number of options to choose from. As it is in most of the action movies – if plan A doesn’t work, switch to plan B, or C, even D if you are really unlucky. Try to be as flexible as you can, and no sudden problem will catch you off guard.

Checking

If you are stuck at some really hard task or encounter a problem that you can’t solve, you must go through the revision process and make a final decision about it. Continue or not? Don’t listen to people when they say “just keep working on it and you will find the solution.” It doesn’t work this way – you may waste a lot of time for no good reason.

What you can do, is to take breaks and use them to establish your progress, as well as other important elements, like:

  • Priorities – Check whether you haven’t lost your main goal from sight.
  • Successes – The completed tasks that became our small victories.
  • Failures – Analyze the mistakes and learn from them.
  • Process – Is your train of thought on the right tracks? Are you doing everything according to the plan? Are there any unnecessary activities that should be immediately removed from the original vision?

It won’t take long to have everything checked, while the benefits that come from going through the revision process may be huge.

book, checked, hand

Organizing

Being organized may be the key factor towards your success. Not only will it save you a lot of time but also a lot of physical and mental health. First of all, you working environment – it is essential that you know exactly how to move about at the office or wherever it is that you work. Don’t spend your precious time working for a pen, a piece of paper, your notes, or anything else that you need for work. The same goes for your working device. Keep your PC clear – file all the stuff into the right folders takes seconds while saving you maybe hours of needless searching. Make your office comfortable and full of stuff that arouses positive emotions, like photos of your family, etc.

And why health? When you are organized, you don’t have to worry about being late or getting overwhelmed with tasks, because you are always up to date with everything you are doing. Also, if your place is neat and clear, you will feel much more comfortable spending time there. The topic of being organized and keeping one’s working place in order is quite large and you can expect a whole post dedicated to this quite soon!

Silver Imac Near White Ceramic Kettle

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Summing Up

We covered the rest of the principles of time management. We hope you find them useful and helpful. Try following those, make notes, check the progress, and don’t forget to share the results in the comments! Also, see our related posts on the topic of time management!

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