Time Management Weblog on AcePlanner

Dear Readers,

We wish you many nice and plesant impressions this year! We hope all of your goals become real this year and all of your dreams became your new goals.

Thanks for staying with us.

Anna and Alexander.

Recently I found a short article “Manage Your Time – Don’t Let It Manage You” by Maud Purcell from psychologist community site. I’m quite interesting in their practical knowledge because time management is more about managing ourselves: controlling our mood, identifying when we are most productive, what kind of work we can do in particular time, how to manage stress and prevent external factors interrupting our work, what planning style is more natural for us, and many more other “why” and “what”.

Ok, here are some of their answers.

First of all Maud suggests to clarify what time management really is. It’s not about doing one hour long task in 5 minutes, but it’s about managing our life and saving time for taking some fun from it.

Second, but not less important, she said what we all have our prime time hours when we concentrate best. For most people it’s early morning, but there are still people who most concentrated and intuitive late afternoon and even in the middle of the night. She suggests to block this time for most important and urgent activities. In AcePlanner it’s A priority. However she doesn’t described methods of identifying the prime time and what most productive time on Monday may not match the prime time on Friday. So my couple of words is here. Most time management books and teachers from time management courses suggest tracking emotional state with colors for a week or two. It’s simple, just prepare sheet on paper: on the X-axes draw days of week, on the Y day hours, half of an hour resolution is enough. Associate colors with your emotional states and mark it in the sheet if your mood changed. Otherwise periodically stop for a second and reflect what you are feeling in the sheet. Our time-management tool also provides this functionality.

Next, she points on time reflection. She suggests to stop for a minute if you find yourself doing some kind of treadmill. Ask yourself if you really need this, if yes, compare it with your priorities and life goals. Yes, this is the central time management tip.

As psychologist she also points us for a valuable mistake, from time-management point of view, absorbing others problems. As usual we need to think twice before putting the power to resolve it.

She also touched procrastination theme. She suggests to not sit “near the task”, just workout it right away. Don’t try to do it perfectly. Good is usually better than perfect. Here Paretto principle is also applicable: 20% of work dedicated for perfectness usually eat 80% of time.

Not surprising for me, she suggests to take time breaks for relaxation. This will ultimately help us being effective not only in the morning.

Here is nothing special, but these tips are quite applicable for our life and work. So let’s save our time for more fun and better life. Don’t hesitate to post comments here. See you next week.

Balance. It’s a nice word but the reality is hard to pin down. It may not even put us on the right track in our 21st century quest for fulfillment and happiness. In this article we will talk about the integration of work and family life, beginning not with the workplace and the employer’s role in sorting things out, but with the person and her priorities.

Generally than people talk about work-life balance they mean the challenge of managing their family commitment when they’ve got children, while juggling the demands of a career. That’s the traditional focus, but the concept has evolved quite a bit. There are now many younger people in the workforce, in their late 20s and early 30s, who may not even have children but they want a sense of balance in their life.

Often we are thinking of some sort of perfection, where nothing is out of place, there’s no stress, and this of course is unrealistic. It automatically means a trade-off between work and life. If I give more time to my family I won’t be able to do my job properly, or if I spend more time on the job my family will suffer. Yet I want to be able to have it all, to do it all, right now.

Let’s think about integration, which means bringing the various pieces of our lives into a cohesive whole. We each have many roles, goals, responsibilities and life plans. We have to get it together. The attractive idea of finding ways to bring life into a unity will give us the harmony and happiness we seek.

Experience shows what people who have very clear priorities and their own clear definition of success succeed best at balancing their lives. They know what’s most important in their lives. These are people who can say, before it happens: If I have to make a choice, if work and family come head to head, I know what my biggest priority is. People who realize it may have slow their career for a period of time, perhaps while a child is younger, and have a less demanding job so they can have more time at home. And they can be at peace with that, because their definition of success is not necessarily the one that society tells them.

Usually we have to just go through life and let the new promotion or the new demands of the job dictate what you do, to feel you don’t have a choice. This is not balanced life road. We need to stop and reflect, communicate more with your husband, your wife, your manager at work, and basically be more pro-active.

The today’s truth is that we have too much to do. Technology has changed things and made people accessible 24 hours a day, encroaching on the peaceful time people used to have. Yet some things don’t change. We still have 24 hours a day. We all have the same amount of time and how we use it comes down to a personal choice.

The disorganization traits usually come from avoiding the choice and try to do too much. Even a simple thing like, What are we going to have for dinner tonight? can become a huge job if we feel, Oh, I’ve a lot of work and will not be able to do grocery shopping. Obviously, if we have the knowledge and skills to make something simpler than we’re going to gain more time. This is what AcePlanner is built on - using good systems to simplify daily tasks so you don’t spend inordinate amounts of time on work.

For balanced life planning and other basic management skills have to be used at home as well as in the workplace. One of the reasons why many people prefer going out to work to working at home is what we’re very organized in the workplace, we use time management there, and then we come home and just ride the waves, consuming ourselves with the latest problem that has cropped up.

However there’s nothing wrong with wanting to go out to work. We do need multiple interests to enrich our lives and many times we have talents that we need to give to the workplace and to the world. But it is true that work on the job is often more attractive because it is more project-oriented and very linear, and at the end of that piece of work we get the praise and a sense of accomplishment, whereas at home every day it’s the same thing.

Human beings have certain basic needs that have to be taken care of every day, and although we can feel a sense of accomplishment that we have organized something at home, it’s soon going to be dirtied again, or another meal is going to have to be put on the table. And this means changing your sense of where you get your satisfaction - not just from accomplishing the task or from the process of doing it, but from the motive.

After a while we noticed what some people goes panic if faced with difficulties of any kind. But other people became even better if difficulties come. Such people usually fill themselves pretty happy. The secret everyone knows I think. It is a positive thinking.

Becoming a positive thinker is easy. Just tell yourself one of the following phrases in case if something goes wrong:

• I know what bad things will not go with me always.
• Bad things happen only to help me understand what is really good for me and illuminate my real goals.
• This is not my failure; this is only one more step to my success.
• This one difficulty is just one more exercise to keep me in a good form.
• Do you fill badly? Yes, I do. Is there a space for worse to come? No. That’s good!
• The item is broken. That’s good, I’ll use released parts for something else. Or even better: this will free up more space in my room.

I covered only few examples of positive thinking here. But best results we can expect with our own positive thinking ideas. Try to write down yours on the scratch or better in the comment.

We are starting this weblog to share our way of positive thinking, tips of searching goals we really desire and methods of getting things done.

Stay on topic and we will open all our secrets of happier and balanced life.