Royane Real

Author of "Your Guide to Making Friendly Conversation"  

There is a lot of information available today about various techniques for successful time management.  One of the most common time management themes is the emphasis on planning how you will use your time.  

Time management experts often tell you to spend a lot of time planning your day for maximum effectiveness.

The truth is, planning your day isn’t the best place to start when you want to become more effective at managing your time.

In fact, the act of planning your time can become a double edged sword.

There are some real dangers that come with overplanning and micromanaging your to - do list.   

If you discover that you spend more time refining your daily to do list than you spend carrying out the activities you need to do, you are using your planning as a way of avoidance.  Instead of helping you become more productive, an over-emphasis on planning can take the place of actually doing anything. 

In a case like this, spending too much time on planning can actually contribute to procrastination and time wasting.

Instead of spending a lot of time planning your activities to the smallest detail, think about what your priorities really are.

The biggest danger of spending too much time planning your day is that you can easily lose track of what your true priorities are.  When you spend too much time creating a perfect time plan, everything on your list starts to seem equally important.  You don’t know where to cut back.  You don’t have a built-in buffer for unexpected situations that come up. 

Another problem with a very detailed time management plan is that not everyone in your life will want to go along with your plan.  Not everyone in your life is going to have the same priorities as you do. 

Anytime you find yourself getting bogged down and frustrated with the way your time is being spent, before you start creating a master plan for every minute of the day, you need to go back and revisit some basics. 

Ask yourself what your real priorities are for your life.  It may take a while for your real priorities to emerge if you have been ignoring them lately. 

For example, if you discover that your top priority is to have a happy home life, it is very possible that some of the activities you are busy with are really counter productive to your main goal. 

If you spend a lot of your time maintaining a super clean house, because you believe that a very clean home is a happy home, you may actually be sacrificing your family’s happiness.  If you are always busy driving your kids around to various lessons and practice sessions, how often are you all together and actually enjoying each other as a family?

The truth is, nobody can get absolutely everything done that they think they need to do.  Something always has to be given up.  In order for you to decide what activities you will drop, what you will postpone, and what will you delegate, you need to have a clear idea of your real priorities are at this point in your life. 

Before you make a time management plan in a lot of detail, spend some time thinking about what is important to you.  Where do you want to be in ten years?  In five?  Work your way backwards to decide what you want to get done this week.

Ask yourself, “What gives me the most satisfaction in my life?  What is most important to me?  What do I really want to accomplish?”

It is only when you know your real priorities for your life that you can start to use your time effectively.

This article is by Royane Real, author of the popular report "Your Guide to Making Friendly Conversation" Learn much more about how to improve your time management skills and sign up for the free self improvement newsletter when you visit my new website at http://www.royane.com 

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