The 21st century is a hectic place. I can easily see that by the end of the 21st century, society could be split into two groups; the winners and losers. Those who can cope with everything that life has to throw at them, and those that can't cope.
People are so busy and have so much going on in their lives today, that many are struggling to cope with it all. People struggle to remember everything that they've got to do and more importantly, they struggle to fit it all in.
It seems that there just isn't the time to fit everything in.
But what about all those high flying millionaires that seem to have even more going on in their lives, and seem to be able to get more done than you do? How do they manage it? How can they cope with everything that you've got going on in your life, plus find time for all the millionaire things?
Well there's a skill which just doesn't seem to be taught either at home or at school, and that's time management. It's just assumed that we'll learn how to manage our own time as we're growing up.
But it doesn't work like that. We spend most of our childhood without having to worry about time management, then within a very short space of time, our life changes and we suddenly have all these adult responsibilities and all these demands on our time. We just don't have the time to learn and adapt to the new requirements.
But, luckily, time management is skill that everybody can learn. Yes, it's a way of life, and learning time management will be a fundamental change in our way of life and the way we behave. But, it's probably the easiest life change that we can make.
There are many different skills to learn so it will take time to learn to master your time, but the advances that you can make in the first few weeks of starting to learn these skills are the most noticeable.
It's not going to be a case of listening to a self help audio book and suddenly it all makes sense and falls into place. It's new skills that you need to learn and adapt to your needs. So you need to be prepared to put in the effort.
One of the best programs on time management is Brian Tracy's How to Master Your Time*. He covers many aspects of time management and present many different skills that you should acquire to master your time effectively.
For example, one of the biggest killers of time is paperwork. And more crucially, going over the same paperwork time and time again. He proposes the "TRAF" system for dealing with paperwork. Each time you pick up a piece of paper, either Throw it away, Refer it to someone else (delegate), Action it immediately, or File it. It's a simple system that I have taken on and it's given me loads more time and made my paperwork much more efficient. Brian Tracy is a big advocate of the "T", throw it away, but I'm still struggling to be as liberal with my throwing away as he encourages, so I do a lot of filing instead. I'll leave you to form your own opinion on this after you've heard what he has to say on it.
Brian also covers quite a few time planning strategies in How to Master Your Time* as this is really the key to every time management program. Rather than promote a single strategy that so many other programs seem to do, he discusses several options because it's down to the individual as to what sort of time planning strategy will suit their tastes and preferences the best. There's no single best way to plan your time.
