Why is it that certain people seem to always be on time and have it ‘all together’ while others consistently struggle?
Have you ever wondered why some people are able to manage their time better than others?
Is managing time just a natural aptitude for some people?
Or, is it due to something else??
What if I shared a secret with you that would instantly heighten your ability to manage your time more effectively?
What if I could help you easily identify your recurring time management ‘problems’… and then take steps to move you forward effortlessly?
Have you ever considered that the critical skills behind managing your time have something to do with heightened self-awareness and conscious decision making?
“Being in touch with who you are is the single biggest secret of success.
Deepak Chopra”
Well, I have, and I’ve isolated three critical Time Management skills that can really help you along the way.
But first, let’s examine the payoff of self-awareness as it relates to making decisions.
Some people seem to amble through life – running amuck here and there and are often very surprised about events that consistently show up for them. These are often the same types of folks that blame ‘bad luck’ for what occurs around them. Often, in coaching – these clients neglect to connect their decision-making to outcomes. These folks are somewhat victimized by circumstances and are sometimes described as having low self-insight.
Compare this to a person with high insight who is faced with a time-oriented decision.
Someone with high insight is one who naturally:
- knows what they are good at and where their gaps exist
- can easily identify when they need support
- has clear boundaries that allow them to accept what they want and need to do, and push back against that which doesn’t serve them
- operates from a strong core values system as a base
- makes mistakes but learns from those mistakes and has internal red flags that highlight potential pitfalls
- has the ability to project potential outcomes to evaluate if an idea or course of action is worth pursuing
We all have our natural style for managing time.
When you understand your own natural time management style, you’ll:
- have the opportunity to make better choices.
- experience more awareness around what causes you to feel stressed.
- feel more empowered on an everyday basis.
- better understand how others view your behavior.
- identify what distinguishes some relationships as more productive than others.
- develop a way of communicating with others that takes into account their behavioral preferences.
- have the opportunity to increase your experience of “flow” as the natural unfolding of life as it happens.
With those payoffs, is it worth it for you to learn more about your natural time management style?
I hope so! But now, let’s dive a bit more deeply into this elusive concept of time management and see if we can apply some of these ideas.
3 Key Time Management Skills
Although there are many skills necessary to effectively manage time, the three areas that help you create more flow in your life center around:
- Managing Your Priorities involves:
- Maintaining perspective when tension rises, using your energy wisely in accordance with priorities, making effective transitions between priorities and balancing multiple tasks productively.
- Attending To Life’s Details involves:
- Paying attention to all the moving pieces of the day in and day out experience. Details can include big and little parts of the whole to produce the required results, getting needed support to accomplish tasks, and understanding the parameters of “good enough” outcomes.
- Taking Action involves:
- Knowing when to initiate movement towards an objective, balancing jumping in too soon against missing and opportunity, recognizing the difference between actions that reduce tension and those in response to a plan, and leaving room for changes in plans and the impact of unforeseen events.
Regardless of whether you are energized by variety and change of pace, or prefer to have tighter controls over your time and work well with routines and plans – what matters when managing your time is learning to differentiate when your behaviors and decisions are serving your desires – and when your decisions and actions are leading you astray.
Self-insight is gained over a lifetime of experience, but heightening your our self-awareness can happen in many ways. If you are struggling to manage your time more efficiently and get everything done so you have time for the things you love most, you can get a kick start by assessing your own natural time management style by taking the Time & Space Style Inventory.
Take the inventory to instantly up-level your ability to manage time, and see how you measure up against the three critical time management skills of managing priorities, attending to details, and taking action. The TSSI™ will help you learn more about yourself, and with this heightened awareness you’ll experience yourself differently – with higher self-insight. You’ll be able to stop feeling like a time-slave and focus on your own activities and decisions to spend your time doing what you want.
Your Sanity Assignment
- Which of the three critical time management skills do you struggle with most today?
- If you could control one of these areas more effectively, which would make the biggest difference in your life-balance and level of daily satisfaction?
Please share your comments and insights below.
********
The Time & Space Style Inventory™ (TSSI™) evaluates your time style preferences and how you manage priorities, attend to details, and take action. By learning your dominant and strong style preferences, you can learn to make the most of your time and choose to take actions that increase natural flow in your life. Consistently taking the Flow Steps in your styles of dominance will help you successfully manage your self, and your decisions about time.
EMBRACE your natural style!
Make it work for you – take the Time & Space Style Inventory™ and identify your time and space styles and enjoy your life. A coach and author, Cena has collaborated with author Sunny Schlenger (suncoach.com) to create the Time & Space Style Inventory™ – a tool that not only identifies natural behavioral styles but also enables you to use that information to create a personalized road map to manage your time and space. Find Sunny’s new book: Flow Formula: A Guidebook to Wholeness and Harmony on Amazon.com.
