How Are Your Time Management Skills?

Well, in all honesty I think mine sucks but I am getting better and can’t even believe that I would be writing a post about time management skills.  In thinking about it tho, I hear from so many on how do you keep up with everything – you seemed so organized.  So have been paying closer attention to my routine – yea I have a routine – hard to believe huh?

So I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day on facebook and was asked how are your time management skills and I guess I never really thought about “ME” having any  – but a person does – and I’ll tell you a few things that help me.

There are things that you do in your life – a routine of things and what happens is that you get so use to doing them as a routine that you don’t even realize that you are practicing time management.  Have you  noticed that the person with the most on their plate usually are the ones that will take the time to be there for you when you need them.

What I have found out that no matter how great your time management skills are – there are only 24 hours in the day – BUT how you deal with each day will be the key.  Like I said earlier, I have a routine that I do daily – do I always get it done daily – NO.  The reasons can be as simple as life gets in the way – things happen that is not in your control – but what you do is not panic as that daily routine will be there tomorrow.

As most of you know, I get many emails and therefore can get behind quickly and I also am the type of person that it bugs me when I’m not caught up and I just rest better when I finally go to bed knowing they are all done.  Well, I have been paying closer attention to my emails lately and have been unsubscribing to many that does not have anything to do with what I’m doing now – you are wasting time if you are not doing this.

When you first start online, you may have had other interest and have since moved on to other things.  As you grow, you will see that you need to narrow your emails down to things that will help you with your business now – not things that has nothing to do with your niche.

Think about it – you may have took out a subscription to a magazine when you were younger on something that you were interested in at the time but as you have matured, gotten married, had kids, have grandkids – those interest might be different now – so what did you do you canceled  your subscription – that is what you have to do with emails that you are getting that have nothing to do with what you are doing NOW in the present.

I ran across this interesting post the other day and altho Susan came up with these time management personalities just for fun – Time Management Personality Types – I found this very interesting and think reading this will help you understand more about you – go find out what personality you are.

The other thing that I find helpful is that doing my daily routine – once I get the emails caught up and how I stay caught up is that in between going from each task – I jump back to the emails and take care of the few that have come in while I was doing something else – so still at the end of the day I can go to bed knowing I’m caught up till I wake up –  I sleep better knowing that lol.

One more thing I have noticed with others and me also at times – you get so involved with what you are doing at the time and you loose track of time – well, I have been sitting a timer – I know this sounds crazy but this will open your eyes to just how much time either is put into a project or how much time you have wasted.

This was a real eye-opener for me as when I first started doing this – my intentions would be I’ll take an hour and go work on keyword research for my next articles or post OR I’d say I’ll go do this quick – it will only take a few minutes and that ran into an 1/2 hour or more – so with the timer – it has made me more aware of the time I’m spending on certain things – you will be surprised when you set a timer to 15 minutes and you are working away on something and the timer goes off and you think to yourself – that can’t be 15 minutes already.

Well, this took me some time to accept that fact that the timer was right – even tho it did not seem like that long – it really was.  Now no matter what time limit you give yourself – stick with it.  You will find that your life will be less stressful and believe that timer with it says it’s been 1/2 hour.

Another thing that I do is when I’m in a writing mood (and yea you get those times when thoughts just come quickly) well take advantage of that time or mood and put them on paper NOW – don’t put them off – then what you do is schedule your post to come out every other day – and by doing that you are learning time management.  Then you have new content coming out on your blog for maybe a week by writing multiple articles while in the writing mood and remember Google loves fresh content.

So, my friend – how are your time management skills????