How To Accomplish More In A Fraction Of The Time

Prioritizing

Not everything in life can be a priority. Many important things will 

compete for attention over your lifetime, but there are not enough 

hours in anybody's lifetime to give attention to everything that could 

potentially be a priority. 

Determining your basic priorities is a key exercise in moving toward 

more efficient use of your time. Your basic priorities provide a means 

for making time choices, helping you decide where it is important to 

invest yourself and where you are able to let go

Prioritizing

Setting priorities is a matter of deciding what is very important. In 

this case, "important" means significant to you. What activities and 

roles give your life meaning? These are the components of your life 

where you would like to succeed the most.

Not everything in your life can be a priority. Many important things 

will compete for attention over your lifetime, but there are not 

enough hours in anybody's lifetime to give attention to everything 

that could potentially be a priority. Determining your basic priorities 

is a key exercise in moving toward more efficient use of your time. 

Your basic priorities provide a means for making time choices, 

helping you decide where it is important to invest yourself and where 

you are able to let go.

On a daily basis, you also have to learn to set task priorities. 

Prioritizing tasks includes two steps:

• Recognizing what needs to be done

• Deciding on the order in which to do the tasks

How do you determine what work needs to be done? For the most 

part, it relates back to your basic priorities. To be efficient in your 

time use, you have to weed out the work that does not fit with your 

basic priorities. Learn to say "no" to jobs that look interesting and 

may even provide a secure sense of accomplishment but do not fit 

with your basic priorities.

You also have to be able to separate out the tasks that require

busywork that tends to eat away at your time. Many tasks that fill 

your day may not really need doing at all or could be done less 

frequently. Task prioritizing means working on the most significant 

tasks first regardless how tempted you are to less significant tasks out 

of the way.

Certain skills help in using time effectively. Most of these skills are 

mental. While it is not necessary to develop all of the skills, each 

contributes to your ability to direct time usage.

Time sense is the skill of estimating how long a task will take to 

accomplish. A good sense of time will help you be more realistic in 

planning your activities. It helps prevent the frustration of never 

having quite enough time to accomplish tasks.

To increase your time sense, begin by making mental notes of how 

long it actually takes to do certain routine tasks like getting ready in 

the morning, running a load of laundry or delivering your child across 

town to baseball practice.

Goal setting is the skill of deciding where you want to be at the end of 

a specific time. Goal setting gives direction to your morning, your day, 

your week and your lifetime. The exercise on deciding your lifetime 

priorities is a form of goal setting. Learn to write down your goals.

If you are like most people, goals are just wishes until you write them 

down. Keep your goals specific, as in "weed the flower beds in front of 

the house" rather than "work on the yard." Keep your goals realistic 

or you will continually be frustrated by a sense of failure.

Standard shifting is adjusting your standards as circumstances 

change. Your standards are what you use to judge whether something 

is good enough, clean enough, pretty enough, done well enough.

Perfectionists have very high, rigid standards, and they have trouble 

adjusting to the changing demands or circumstances of their life. 

Develop the ability to shift standards so you can be satisfied with less 

than perfect when your time demands are high, instead of feeling as if 

you are somehow falling short.

Time planning is outlining ahead of time the work you need to be

done in a specific period. Sometimes time planning is as simple as 

writing out a "To Do" list to ease you mind from holding on to too 

much detail.

At particularly stressful times, the "To Do" list may expand to include 

a more specific calendar of when tasks will be done. While a detailed 

time schedule can be too confining to use all of the time, it is a good 

way to take the pressure off at exceptionally demanding times.

Recognizing procrastination is a skill in itself because procrastinators 

can do an incredible job of hiding their procrastination from 

themselves. Procrastination is needlessly postponing decisions or 

actions.

You might disguise the procrastination response with an excuse like 

waiting for inspiration, or needing a large block of time to concentrate 

with your full attention, or needing more information before tackling 

a project.

It takes skill to differentiate between procrastination excuses and 

legitimate reasons for delaying a decision or action. Without the 

ability to recognize when you are, procrastinating there is little 

chance of overcoming this immobilizing habit.