5 Reasons Time Management Is Worth All The Effort

Time is the most precious resource you have.

Often, people lose consciousness of this and waste their time unconsciously.

If you're one of those who do this, it's okay. I understand your plight. I fight every day to get the most out of my time.

In fact, everybody you think is an epitome of time management goes through the same fight every single day. And you must go through this fight too if you want to get the best out of your time.

Do you need time management at all? What are the reasons time management is worth all the effort you put into it?

In this post, I’ll be talking about 5 reasons you should embrace time management and spend your time consciously. Because when you consider it, losing time is worse than losing money.

1.      Makes your actions more conscious

If you're one of those who asks after a day ‘where did all the days go?’, then you need to manage your time more efficiently. 

Because if you don't, the next question you’ll ask will be: ‘where did all the days of the week go?’ And then you ask ‘where did all the months of the year go?’

Source: Pixabay

It starts little, like a little crack at the side of a house. At first, it’s invisible. Then it starts to show itself but it still looks harmless. If you let that crack widen for too long, then the house itself will soon find it impossible to stand.

If you fail to manage your time, after many years, the question you’ll ask is: ‘where did all the years of my life go?’ And it will be too late to make amends.

This is because, without time management, you lose consciousness of your days. You spend your days without much thought. 

In fact, you're not really spending your day, you're going through it like a haze doing whatever the day has for you. You can bet the day has a lot of distractions for you.

When you engage in time management, you have the consciousness that time is the most valuable resource in the world.

You can make achievements as a rich man, you can make achievements as a poor man. You can make achievements as a disabled man or despite all other range of disadvantages.

But you can make no achievement without time. Time is what connects all achievements together. Whatever you have achieved is related to how you spent your time. And the beauty of it is that the same 24 hours is available to everybody.

Time management gives you the consciousness that time should be treasured like gold. When you start wasting your time on trivial things, the question comes to you: ‘Is this how I would spend my money?’

“Time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.” - Brian Tracy

2.                Helps you to set your priorities

When you manage your time, one effect that comes with it is that you have to set your priorities. It’s difficult for anybody to plan how they’ll spend their day and give 3 hours out of it to ‘distractions’.

Planning your day also means you have to define your most important targets and the trivial matters.

Source: Pixabay

For instance, if you're the sales manager of your company, reviewing your sales result and improving your sales methods with your sales team is more important than a generic workplace meeting you have to attend. 

Without adequate time management, it's easy to have no priority and do whatever comes your way.

Time management gives you a bigger control due to the knowledge you have about your priorities. You're able to pick out activities that are important to your career and family life. 

I’m sure these activities do not include sitting for hours in front of your TV or spending an endless amount of hours in front of your TV.

Today, technology has made things so easy, including indulging in distractions. It’s easy for you to spend the whole of the day being busy while achieving nothing of note.

Today, people actually believe the connection with people is vital and therefore see it as a necessity to waste their time on social media. 

But is social media so important that you should fail at achieving your important goals just to connect with people, who most times don't care much about you?

When you manage your time wisely, it makes you list out your priorities according to their order of importance.

“Calendar management is the single most important thing, especially as you get busy and have more responsibilities.” - Mary Callahan Erdoes, CEO of JPMorgan Asset Management.

3.                 Helps you to focus on your most important targets

Time management not only help you set your priorities, but it also helps you to maintain a focus on the most important things. When you plan to carry out important activities for a day, managing your time wisely means you're able to focus on those things

When you focus on the most important things, you're able to say no to other things. It's easy to say yes to everything if you don't manage your time. 

There's no problem in wasting it on things that are not important to you. Because you don't have better things to do with your time.

You're unable to say no to avoid offending the person asking for your time. Yes, it’s your time but other people want to spend it for you.

It is common to take a break from your work to do a bit of chatting or even check your email. This divides your attention and you fail to do any of the tasks properly. 

James Clear calls this half-work. Carl Newport in his book, Deep Work, calls it shallow work. This is an effect of poor time management.

Managing your time means you can take control of your time and focus on your biggest priorities. You're able to say no to everything that will be an obstacle to your important targets. Thereby, you have even more time to achieve your most important goals.

Because you have planned your time wisely, you know what you can achieve daily, you know what you can achieve weekly. And you can predict what you’ll achieve in a month time.

This is because managing your time helps you focus on important activities and you're able to finish them in less time than it used to take.

4.                 Helps you to achieve more in less time

If you give two people two years, who do you think will achieve more during the two years? The person who spent their time wisely. Have you noticed that some people achieve in one year what some people struggle to achieve in 4?

Source: Pixabay

If this trend continues for years, there will be a wide gap in achievement between someone who manages their time wisely and someone who sees no reason to manage their time.

Why do some people achieve more in less time? Because they cut their distractions ruthlessly. They see the distractions as the enemy, not enjoyment. They believe time spent on distractions is time that could be spent on making important achievements.

5.                 You have enough time to help others

Have you noticed that some people are always busy? They never have time. But when you cut through all their busyness, they fail to make important achievements.

These are the people who would keep busy with tasks they can delegate to someone else. They just have to keep up the image of being busy. Even if they have to waste their time doing it.

As a result of this, they have no time to help others.

People who manage their time wisely, on the other hand, have enough time to help others. They never tell people they’re so busy. But they still manage to achieve a lot more than other people.

And along the way, they help more people and influence them to achieve their goals too. In fact, not only are they able to help others, they’re able to help themselves too.

They’re able to get more time for vacation. They spend more time with their family without any harm to their any harm to their career.

What To Do

If you have not been managing your time, then you have been leaving many achievements on the table. Time management is essentially life management. Because whatever you achieve with your time is what you achieve with your life.

What can you do if you have never managed your time wisely and you need to get the most out of your time before it’s too late?

Just as you waste your time daily, you can start spending your time wisely.

• Keep a journal where you list the most important activities you need to achieve for a day and the time you need to achieve them.
• The key is not choking yourself. You need to leave a space for breaks because everyone needs it.
• During the day, try to keep another journal of how you really spent your day.
• At the end of the day, make a review and check the list you prepared to see how many of the tasks you were able to complete. Compare the initial list to how you really spent your time.
• In the beginning, you’ll find that you're unable to achieve all the important goals. This is not a big problem. That's why the review is important. It helps you to troubleshoot and discover the worst culprits wasting your time.
• Make a plan on how to prevent the time drain the next day. And review how you spent your day.

Over time, you’ll improve your time management skills and you’ll be able to cut distractions out more effectively.

Conclusion

Whatever effort you put in time management will produce tremendous results that justify the effort. Time management has enormous benefits for anybody who engages in it. Now, the question to ask is not ‘why engage in time management?’ but ‘why not?’

How do you approach time management and what benefits have you gotten out of it? I’ll like to hear your views in the comment.

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