paul-kingTime Management Tips - no. 6 - are you working towards your goals?
You can work as hard as you want, and as efficiently, but if it’s not bringing you any closer to your goals then it’s time to take stock.
“If you’re going nowhere, you’re guaranteed to get there”
Effective time tracking can help you to understand if your working habits are congruent with your goals. Here is a simple method you can use to make sure you’re working ‘clever’ rather than just working hard.
Step 1-Record your daily activities
Using 1DayLater, record your daily activities over a week - or better still; over a month.
Step 2-Rank your activities in decending order
Rank your activities in descending order, with the most time-hungry tasks at the top of the list.
Step 3-Compare with your ideal case
Write our a separate list of projects and tasks in the order they should be in. Compare this to the real case; showing what you actually spent time on. Is the weight of each task mirrored by your actual ‘real life’ activities. If the ‘actual’ and the ‘ideal’ don’t mesh, then why not? Are you spending too much time on low priority tasks?
Try to look of your ‘bigger picture’ and see which tasks will benefit you in the long term. If these are being neglected it’s likely you’re getting sidetracked by low importance, urgent tasks (see our earlier article on this).
Improve
Now, armed with your newfound knowledge you can start improving the way that you work on a daily basis…
