Successful Time Management

For me, successful time management is about achieving those things that I want to achieve, in my lifetime.

I can think of nothing worse than being on my deathbed and knowing that I had lived an entire lifetime that had been wasted.

The difficulty is that most of us have a list of things that we want to achieve during our life - not just one thing!

Life is changeable,.. and not entirely predictable either. That doesn't mean that there aren't parts of it over which you can have control. And if you have control - even if it's only slight ñ it means you have steerage.

• It's you who decides where life is going to go.
• It's you who decides the direction of your life.
• It means that making life fulfilling, enjoyable and worthwhile - is a choice!

Not everyone sees life this way. Why?

Because so many people get bogged down by the little things in life. They get stuck in the minutiae of life. They spend their time doing unimportant things. They spend time doing things that they just can't connect to a direction in life.

Oh, it seems like they're important things at the time, but a lot of the stuff that we do is not life changing. And, if it's not life changing then you may be losing steerage in your life.

Try taking the lifetime perspective:

Looking at "time" from a "lifetime" perspective adds some valuable scale. Lifetime activities and lifetime goals are a big thing in a lifetime. What you need to know though is that people perform lifetime activities and reach lifetime goals on a day-by-day basis - in short, they do little bit day-by-day.

That can trip a lot of people up.

We are so easily put off doing our little bit each day. In practice,

• mundane distractions,
• having the impression that something must be done when it needn't,
• doing things through habit (like watching TV),

Significantly, we forget to ask whether what we are doing is one of those things, which bit-by-bit, and day-by-day takes us further to our lifetime activities and lifetime goals.

Even when we're not distracted, we have too many goals

There too many things we want to achieve. It gets complicated. It gets messy. We struggle with conflicting goals and indecision. (How do we make a serious amount of money whilst at the same time we're developing a serious.. ahem.. romantic meaningful, relationship, whilst at the same time dieting and trying to find time for the exercise routine, as well as looking after our ageing parent?)

If you want to spend time doing what matters in your life, then accept that you will have lifetime activities and lifetime goals in different areas of your life.

Want some classified information?

Your life is made up of different parts, like home life, work life and religious life. Figure out the different parts of your life and classify it.

Maybe it's something like this:

You see, once you know what the parts of your life are it is so much easier to make sure that they fit together easily. It's like putting the pieces of a jigsaw together; it's just that we're making sure all the jigsaw pieces come from the same puzzle! When we look at what we want to achieve in the different parts of our life we are able to make sure that they support each other rather than conflict with each other.

And that's it.

It's about making sure that all the things that you do during your life lead to what you really want for your life.

The article Successful Time Management was especially written for Power-Traits.com by Jon Seaton who shares their passion for helping people live a fulfilling life. Jon uncovers other success secrets on his own site at Practical-Success-Secrets.com