Being a Student of Time Management
Of all the skills that you can learn to be successful as an entrepreneur or a career professional, time management is arguably the most fundamental and also the most important. Time management is not just about make schedules and following your to do lists – to be truly successful, you need to incorporate the mental patterns of being conscious about how you spend time.
Much like you spend all your life learning wealth-building habits, there is also a need to learn time management. In other words, you should become a student of time management. It sounds odd, but once you treat time management as a proper skill and not something you apply in crisis situations you will be able to see the vast gains in your productivity.
Learn From the Best
As a student of time management your first task is to surround yourself with the most accomplished leaders of this field. This in effect means that short of being able to apprentice with a time management mastermind like David Allen, you have to acquire resources (namely books and tools) that will help you learn. We all have problems with managing our time – what matters is how we deal with such issues. By committing yourself to be a student of time management you should also commit yourself to learning from the best, and that means starting by acquiring the books and tools put out by the time management experts of our day.
Being a Successful Student of Time Management
Learning about time management does not automatically make you good at it. To be successful, you have to develop a process of evaluating your progress and developing a process by which you can continuously ‘refine’ your time management habits.
Eliminating Waste
As a student of time management your biggest task will always be to fight against time wasting. Did you know that wasted time is the number one cause of stress in North America?
There comes a time when you feel that you have mastered a skill – this comes after thousands of hours of practice and implementation. At that point, you have a choice – you can choose to be satisfied with your progress and the improvements you have made in your life, or you can choose to remain a student of time management and develop your skills further.
At this point, the choice is yours – you have already brought marked improvements to your life by investing so much into managing your time better; it is up to you to decide whether you are happy with your success or whether you want more.
My guess is that when you reach that point, you will definitely want more. But the real battle (and the reason why you should become a student of time management) is getting to that point first.
