How Do You Use Your 24 Hours a Day?

Dear Reader

Have you ever wondered how some people are much more organised and effective than others? Do you know people who always seem to be in control and get everything done? What makes them so special? Do they have more time than you?

If you’d like to be as effective and in control as these people, then read on to find out how to do it.

Kind regards,

Ian

info@absolutelearning.co.uk

www.absolutelearning.co.uk

01483 303 593


How Do You Use Your 24 Hours a Day?

I’m going to let you into a secret. We all have exactly the same number of hours in day – 24. And what’s more, we can’t actually control time. It’s all about our own personal effectiveness and how we make use of the time that we have.

There’s nothing new about the fact that we seem to have less and less time. The more work you do, the more work comes your way. With e-mail, the internet, mobile phones and tablets, we’re never out of touch, with increasing demands for our time. Most approaches for time management focus on techniques to manage activities. Here is how to review your use of time from three very different perspectives. 

1. What’s the Purpose?
It’s easy to allow work to fill your time, regardless of whether or not it’s aligned with your goals. Take some time to step back and look at what you’re currently doing and match it to the purpose of your business and against your own goals and values. If you find yourself doing things that don’t actually help you to achieve your goals, should you really be doing them? If you don’t have a clear, compelling vision and purpose for your business and for yourself, then creating one should be your top priority. If an activity doesn’t help you to reach a goal, what’s the point of doing it?

2. What’s the Hidden Driver?
There is always a reason that drives what you do. This is even true for activities that aren’t aligned with your goals. In this case the motivating force, the ‘driver’, is usually hidden. Often we don’t look at the motivations behind what we do, usually because it’s not comfortable to admit to doing something that you probably shouldn’t be doing! Do you find yourself answering e-mails after normal working hours, holding long conversations when short ones would do, doing something yourself rather than delegating it? If so, take the time to look at what’s driving you to do these things. And then challenge yourself to stop doing them!

3. Most Traditional Time Management Approaches are no Longer Relevant
Any time management approach that was developed before the age of mobile phones and the internet is fundamentally flawed. The flaw is that they pre-suppose that you will get everything done!

These days, the more you complete and the more you communicate with people, the more work you create. You finish writing a newsletter and send it off to be checked, thinking it can be ticked off your list; but the edited version then comes back for final review and you have yet another thing to add to your ‘to do’ list.

Approaches to time management need to address this fact, and work in an age where you will never get everything on your list done. Successful training approaches not only introduce new support structures tailored for the internet age, but also challenge us to expose and let go of our outdated beliefs about what it is possible to achieve.



How Can You Make the Most of Your 24 Hours?

If you:

• discover your purpose and align everything you do with reaching your goals;

• then expose and get rid of your hidden drivers, and

• honestly face up to the reality that you will never get it all done ...

... your problems with time management will be under your control and you’ll become much more effective and organised. How good does that sound? And now you have time to do something about it! When you’ve been through this process, click here to tell me what you won’t be doing any more.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker.



Where Can You Get More Help?

At Absolute Learning we run workshops to help people become more organised and effective. If you’d like to learn really effective ways of getting more from your 24 hours a day, then get in touch to talk about how we can help you to fit it all in!