Ways To Make Better Use Of Your Time.

Time is your most precious resource. Once lost, it cannot be replaced. Great executives become merely good executives when they don’t use time well. Good executives turn into great ones when they apply each minute to its best purpose. 

1. Bring your daily priorities into synch with your values and beliefs. 

We achieve true happiness when we spend our day doing what is most important to us. Are you in touch with your priorities?

• Identify your values and beliefs about vital components of your life: faith, family, friends, service, work, security, knowledge, achievement, advancement, creativity, leadership, communication, leisure, and possessions.
• List those values and beliefs in priority order. 
• List the activities that consume your time. 
• Compare the two lists. What do the contrasts suggest you should change to make your life more satisfactory and fulfilling?

2. Take a memory course. 

Stop wasting time looking for things you have forgotten. Learn how to recall names, statistics, telephone numbers, and other critical information you should have at your finger tips. 

3. Learn to speed read. 

Keep up with the torrent of information top exectives need to absorb. 

4. Waste less time. 

• Run more efficient meetings; discontinue unnecessary ones. 
• Protect yourself from unwanted visitors; find a hideout when you need uninterrupted time; use your secretary to screen out unnecessary calls. 
• Don’t contribute to conversations that are not going anywhere – end them by silence or by walking away. 
• Shorten appointments by 25% and force yourself to get just as much done. 
• Stand up when you talk on the telephone; outline topics before you call. 
• Learn how to type at least 50 words per minute. 
• Clear your desk of distracting materials. 
• Stop losing things – put them only where you know you will look for them. 
• Write answers in the margins of the letters you receive and mail or fax a copy back. 
• Stop revising when the cost of redoing exceeds the value gained. 
• Stop procrastinating  – do that unpleasant chor right now. 

5. Spend less time in crisis. 

Don’t be caught up in the tyranny of the urgent. Think twice before leaving an important task in favor of one that shouts louder. Many crises don’t deserve the attention we give them. Plan more thoroughly. Question the assumptions behind your decisions, and fewer of them will come back to haunt you in the form of crises. When you are diverted from one function to attend to an emergency, take note of where you are in the original task and where your thinking appears to be taking you so you will more quickly get back into it when the emergency subsides. 

6. Spend less time performing routine tasks. 

Routine tasks include record keeping, repetitive work, maintenance, responding to requests, and travel. The three best ways to reduce the routine in your work :

• Automate using improved technology.
• Delegate to assistants.
• Eliminate by not doing it; consider how you might use that time more profitably. 

7. Spend more time strategically. 

Examples of time spent strategically include planning, growing professionally and personally, creating something, achieving important goals, keeping others informed, and supervising, coaching, or teaching others. 

8. Use a comprehensive calendar and priority management system. 

A number of good systems are available, but they work only if you rigorously follow their prescriptions. Get your entire team to use the same system and you will improve coordination. 

9. Spend more time with people, less time with things. 

As the person in charge, one of your primary functions is to maximize the value of the human assets under your command. Reallocate 10% of the time you spend in fron of your computer, bent over paperwork, or meeting with people outside the company to be with your employees.

10. Restore your energy. 

You need to be in shape to attack your work with enthusiasm and passion so that you, your people, and your company get the most out of your time. Build your energy by eating less fat and more fruits and vegetables, by drinking plenty of water, by breathing deeply, by exercising briskly three or more times each week, and by getting the right amount of sleep. If your stamina has fallen off, see a doctor. 

11. Improve your communication skills. 

Speak and write with the determination to be understood so that you don’t need to send the same message twice. Listen with the determination to understand so you donnot have to ask unnecessary questions or make uninformed mistakes. (15 – 18………)

12. Three times each day ask yourself, “is this the best use of my time?”

When the answer is no, switch to a more meaningful task. 

13. Take time to improve the quality of your life. 

Play to stay young. Daydream to see more clearly the road to your future. Read to renew your mind. Help needy people to uplift your spirits. Think about the people you love in order to draw yourself more closely to them emotionally. Spend more time with the people you love to feel better about yourself. Laugh to restore your balance and reduce stress. Develop new skills to keep yourself in demand. Explore your spiritual side to understand life and to accept your limitations in it.

14. Reserve one hour each day for yourself. 

During this time, which might be planned jointly with a loved one, do what you most enjoy doing and what recharges your batteries, not what the world tells you to do. 

15. Find Joy in the doing. 

Do not have such an urgent need to complete tasks that you miss out one the delight of performing them. In other words, don’t become so obsessed with time management that life becomes a frenzy of achieving one goal after another. You spend far more of your life experiencing than achieving. Learn to enjoy these experiences for their inherent pleasures, rather than for the rewards that may follow them. Liberate yourself to have fund as you work. 

16. Find the joy in today. 

John Lennon sang that life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. Do not get caught in the “future trap”. Don’t wait for life to get less complicated, demanding or routine so that you can begin enjoying it. First, it may never get simpler, easier, or more exciting. Second, there is a lot of fun to be had living even the most complicated, demanding, and routine of lives – don’t let one precious moment of life pass without living it to the fullest. Stop waiting for a better tomorrow; delight in today. 

By: Mohammad Ifrahim Butt, Abu Dhabi, UAE.