Do you usually feel overwhelmed with all the tasks included in your to-do list?
Are you struggling every single day to meet your deadlines despite putting in a lot of challenging work? Do you end up double booking or forgetting appointments because you never had the time to go through your schedule first?
Were there important projects that were overlapped by the smaller “fires” that need your attention? These, my dear friend, are symptoms that your time management is going out of control.
At one glance, it might seem like all tasks listed on your list have equalimportance and urgency. But with just several minutes of your time, their differences will quickly become clearer once you learned how to determine your priorities then start organizing and executing around them.
There are many cases when people are all too excited in managing their time in the hopes of allotting enough for everything that they end up neglecting the more vital things and putting more effort and time on those that are not of great importance.
Identifying and deciding what is the most essential is one skill that you can develop with a mindful practice. Every person in this world has his or her own unique set of goals, responsibilities, and duties and no single formula is working for everybody.
To have an effective setting of priorities, you need to understand first your personal dreams and roles. What are the duties of your job? What kind of commitments do you have to the community and your family? What are your long term professional and personal aspirations? How do you plan to move toward them? Once all these things have been clear to you, it will also become easier for you to define your life’s priorities and set your time to make the most out of it.