Time Management Strategy For Achieving Goals
Author: Stuart Warner

If you get your time management strategy right, you're more than half way to achieving your goals. Here I'm not talking about the detail of how you plan your schedule. This isn't about how to organize your time. It's more concerned with what you need to spend your time on.

To give you an example, there's a phrase in time managment about 'shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic'. It didn't matter how efficiently the deck chairs were shuffled, the key task was to avoid ice-bergs. So what are the key tasks on which to focus your time when it comes to goals?

There are several elements to effective time management strategy for goals. You need to cover all these elements.

Double Vision

Working ON your goals

Choosing the right goals

LEFT brain activities

RIGHT brain activities

DOUBLE VISION

You need to plan your time with one eye on today and the other eye on your longer term goals. Usually goals take a while to achieve, but every goal is reached by taking just one step at at time. It's easy to overwhelm yourself if you expect to achieve your goal with one big jump. So today take one step - just make sure that step takes you nearer your goal.

WORKING ON YOUR GOALS

In his million selling book for small business owners 'The E-Myth', Michael Gerber explains the difference between working ON a business and working IN a business. As the Goals Guy, Gary Ryan Blair suggests, the same principle can be applied to goals.

Working ON your goals is where you remove yourself from the detail of working towards your goal and spend time managing the goal achievement process.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT GOALS

The second time management strategy is to choose the right goals - a point that I've made many times on my goals web site. As Stephen Covey wrote, you need to make sure that your ladder is leaning against the right wall.

It doesn't matter how well you use your time, if you choose the wrong goals you won't fulfil your potential. First, it will be much more difficult to achieve your goals if you make the wrong choice and second, even if you do reach your goals, you'll have spent time on something that wasn't particularly important to you. Isn't life too short for that?

LEFT BRAIN ACTIVITIES

In terms of goal setting, left brain activities cover the logical, analytical, factual side of things, like writing down your goals. In my view, Gary Ryan Blair is one of the top authors on goals-related left brain activities, the third element of a successful time management strategy for reaching goals.

For example, he stresses the importance of planning your goals thoroughly, and in particular creating a very specific picture of the WHAT, WHY and HOW of your goals. You need to know 'what' you're aiming at, 'why' you want it, and 'how' you will achieve it.

There's no doubt that you can get a long way with an entirely left brain approach if you follow it diligently. However, my view is that this is only half the picture.

RIGHT BRAIN ACTIVITIES

An often underestimated time management strategy is focusing on right brain activities. These use your creative imagination, for example visualizing your goals and using strategic relaxtion techniques as described in PsychoCybernetics, the classic self help book written by Dr Maxwell Maltz in 1960.

One of the key reasons you need to spend time on right brain activities is to make use of your automatic success mechanism. You can read about this in the book, or in my review of the audio program on my web site. If we can use our left brain to create a specific idea about the goal we want to achieve, we can then tap into our right brain by visualization techniques such as 'mental movies'.

A second reason for using right brain activities is to make sure your self image matches your goals. It's virtually impossible to achieve a goal if your self image does not match your idea of the sort of person who achieves the goal that you've set. So right brain activities are the fourth key element in a goals related time management strategy.

If you focus on the five elements of time management strategy you have a much better chance of achieving the goals you set.






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Stuart Warner is a business coach and editor of the web site www.make-your-goals-happen.com

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