Madeleine Morgan of Growu writes:
That’s sound advice that can help us create amazing levels of personal, career and business success, but… how do you know what’s really important?
Life can be full of dilemmas when it comes to managing your time.
And…our emotions, values and beliefs can easily blind us, confuse us and lead us astray.
For instance, do your recognise these or similar situations?
- If you run a business, do you find it’s tempting to prioritise client work all the time, especially if you enjoy using the skills you need to use to complete it and you love helping people? But, if you neglect sales and marketing activities because it’s more difficult and uncertain, how do you keep new client work and profits flowing to you?
- At work, do you find it’s hard to choose between working towards your own objectives, set with your manager, and being a team player and helping others achieve theirs, if the two objectives don’t dovetail?
- If you’re a manager, are you tempted to do what you should delegate to others because you like doing that type of work or you believe you can do it better and quicker?
- Do you experience a real internal tussle when you’re worried about losing your job or losing business or looking like you’re a failure if you don’t do extra work but then find you miss out on enjoying quality family time?
- When you feel like you’re losing control of your time in the morning do you find it’s hard to stop fire fighting and you end up playing catch up all day?
- Have you noticed that when you think someone has upset you, you find it takes ages to bounce back into a positive and productive mood?
When the emergency services get to a difficult incident, they have to prioritise or triage who needs their help first. They have triage rules to help them do that. The person who has a life threatening condition will get treated first, not the easiest person to treat or the person making the most fuss.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were some absolute triage rules in life to help us make the right time management decisions in all circumstances?
Here are 4 ideas for making time management triage easier
- Carve out a calm time in your day to plan how you will use your time before all your emotions get in the way.
- Look for ways to leverage your time and create win-wins e.g. your keep-fit-time and your quality-family-time could sometimes be combined by choosing an active activity you can enjoy together so that one doesn’t lose out to the other.
- Learn how to empower family members, friends, colleagues and employees so they only need you for the things only you can do.
- Fear is usually a terrible criteria for using your time – deal assertively with your fear and with other time stealers
If you know that managing your time better would bring you more career, personal and business success, here are two ways you can do something about it:
1. Getting to Grips with Time Management Workshop
Thursday 13 February 8.45 a.m. to 12.30, in Cambridge
This half-day workshop is jammed packed with time management and procrastination-busting tools that will help you triage your to do list, create more time, be more productive and enjoy your mastery of time. Click here for more details
2. If you prefer a 1-2-1 focus, try my complimentary ‘Time for Success’ coaching session
I have 4 complimentary spaces for 1-2-1 ‘Time for Success’ Sessions in February. During that session we’ll:
- Discover the time and success stealers in your business, career or personal life.
- Discuss how you’d like to be using your time and what you’d like to be achieving
- Get clear about how you can make it happen.
You’ll go away feeling positive, excited and certain about your next steps.
If you would like to apply for a session, just email me: madeleine@growu.co.uk
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