What is Time Management? And Does it Actually Work?

Time management is the art of prioritizing, arranging, organizing, scheduling, and budgeting your time with the objective of becoming more productive and effective. There are loads of books, classes, workshops and expensive seminars on time management, which aim to teach both individuals and even large corporations to be more productive and more effective. In this modern world where everything works 24/7 time management has become more crucial than ever.

Good time management is important everyone, not just hot shot executives. Heck, plenty of working mums have a busier schedule with more conflicting priorities than many so-called executives. Nonetheless, the typical time management books and seminars usually focus on business leaders and big companies – most likely because that is where the money is.

Time management is truly big business. But students, teachers, factory workers, doctors, professionals and just about anybody would benefit tremendously from good time management. In fact, students probably stand the most to benefit from learning time management as they still have their whole career and most of their life in front of them.

OK, but what is time management?

Other than the definition given above, there is not an easy answer to what time management is. It really depends on who you ask because there are so many different approaches and even more time management gurus. To name a few: Stephen Covey, David Allen, Timothy Ferris, Mark Hurst and there are many more. In future posts I will focus on each of these gurus and what they preach, but for now I’ll try to distill the essentials of time management.

First of all, time management is much more, or at least in my mind, should be much more than a bunch of IT tips and tricks or a matter of getting your stuff organized. Good time management should go to the heart of who you are, your wants and your needs. You need to understand these so you can prioritize properly and ensure you actually achieve what you are aiming for. This does assume you actually know what you want – even that simple question can be a big problem for many of us!

Secondly, an important aspect of time management is planning ahead. In order to be successful in time management you usually have to set away a decent chunk of time early on to reorganize your life. Though many time management books and approaches differ in their suggestions, most agree that the first step in efficient time management is to organize the workspace or home. In fact you really need to do both. Even if your schedule is well-ordered, but as long as the office and your filing system (if you have one) are a disaster, you’ll lose a whole lot of valuable time trying to work efficiently in a disorderly place.

Third. After cleaning, purging, and reorganizing the home or office, the next step in time management is to look at all the activities, commitments and deadlines you have. Some time management approaches require that every last detail should be written down, including the time it takes to shower, dress, commute, attend meetings, make phone calls, clean the house, cook dinner, pick up the children from school, take them to after-school activities, and eat meals. Add to that time for entertainment or exercise, such as driving to the gym, going for a walk, watching television, or surfing the Internet. Once you’ve done all that you’ll typically find you do not have enough time in the day to do all that is  ‘required’. So then you prioritize and delete, delegate or defer until you have a schedule that fits the limited hours in a day or week.

Traditional time management approaches then continue with a requirement of keeping a detailed schedule of all the tasks and activities that been prioritized. In these approaches a calender or daily planner is used to stay on task. Many approaches stress at this point the importance of self-discipline highlighting that even the most efficient to-o list in the world would not help anyone if you didn’t look in or use that daily planner.

But to me, this is exactly where the traditional time management approaches fail – no matter how well you try, how organized you are there are always – and I mean ALWAYS – external influences which will screw up your carefully prepared schedule. All that hard work suddenly seems wasted and many people soon give up and go back to their usual, disorganized style of life.

Any good time management approach has to be flexible in many aspects to fit in the daily life of someone living in the 21st century – 1980′s approaches simply don’t work anymore!

So, the question is: what does work?