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In the world of people around us, there are more successful and less successful. There are those who have realized themselves in many spheres, manage their lives and understand what they want to achieve in the future. And there are those who “go with the flow”. And all this is our own choice.
Meanwhile, you can learn how to manage your destiny. To do this, we must master the art of correctly prioritizing and realizing ourselves in all areas of life that we need for happiness and progress. How can you learn this?
The secret of the first: universal recipes, suitable for everyone, does not exist! But this does not mean that you can not use the experience gained and tested by other people. On the contrary, it is necessary to begin with this. And to adjust and adapt for their needs the advice of coaches, business coaches and psychologists, and then.
Primary and secondary goals
Do you have the most important, main goal in life? And the very first goal in this year? Surprisingly, the English word Priority, which arose in the XV century, more than five hundred years of its existence did not have a plural! It seemed right and normal for people to have a single, most important goal. This situation persisted until the twentieth century. Now in any company and at any meeting, employees put ten or more priority tasks only for the current day.
If this principle is admitted into one’s life, then the feeling of being a squirrel running in a wheel will remain with you until retirement. Learn to reduce the number of priorities and clearly understand what your main task is – to start at least for today.
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At the same time, immediately try to understand whether this is your goal, or imposed on you from outside – friends, relatives, management and so on. In our society, the volume of contacts with other people is so great that it is difficult to distinguish what we ourselves want to do, from what society imposes on us. Therefore, often more than half the time is spent on things that are not important for us, but urgent and important for others.
This does not mean that we should give up helping other people. But it is important to realize that these are not your tasks, and you are doing them, willingly putting off your own affairs for later.
Five Steps to Manage Your Time
Extraordinarily popular now are the principles of time management, which make life more meaningful, organized and harmonious. On the time management written volumes, and still a huge number of psychologists and coaches continue to teach people how to properly manage their time.
Note, it is much more important not to talk about this, but to begin to translate into your own life at least some principles of time management, and you yourself will understand what techniques are right for you and which are not. These principles are rather simple, but it is important to implement them systematically.
The first thing to do is to highlight the very priorities that have already been discussed. In practice, this is difficult, so we need to make a list of the most important, global goals. And then filter it according to the degree of importance and urgency. It is necessary to do this.
If you do not plan your future, if you do not have a goal or plan, then you are like a boat that drifts aimlessly in the ocean, hoping to be somewhere in a good place. Agree, it’s silly to wait for it. Just like GPS directs you to your destination, you need your own internal GPS that will guide you.
The second step is to divide the large volume plans into a list of smaller tasks that can really be accomplished. Do not delay the beginning of a lot of work! When the plan is voluminous, it frightens you, but you just have to start making the first of the items, and the path to the final is already presented as a list of quite feasible tasks.
The third step is the refusal to perform secondary things. Focus only on the main thing! This is called the Pareto principle. It says that 80% of the positive results we get, applying only 20% of the effort. And all our other forces go to do the remaining small list of cases. Therefore, it is necessary to perform only what we can be effective in. And what remains, it is better to outsource, delegate, or even sweep, as not the most important.
Fourth – by all means, finish one or two deferred cases per day.
And, finally, the fifth – evaluate your effectiveness, raise it all the time. Do not quit long-term business halfway, but lead to the logical end of their implementation and outline new goals.
That’s all. Although each of the items can be deployed in several lectures. But instead of endlessly studying the theory, it is better to take the techniques invented by other people, and try to apply them yourself. You will quickly understand what suits you and what does not. After all, managing your time is just a skill. But it makes our life much more meaningful and structured.
Plans for the year, for the week, for the month
In parallel with long-term planning, which still needs to mature, it is worth starting to create more understandable and realistic plans for the day and for the week. Ideally, you should have related plans for each year, for a month, for a week, for a day.
Plans for the next year are best written at the end of the previous one, but in January it is not too late to think about it, of course. First, formulate the main goals and mark the main events. When will they occur? Now start planning your vacation! Enter the annual leave plan and where you will spend it, as well as all vacations, trips and travel. Now decide when you need to organize them to buy the most successful and inexpensive tickets and book hotels.
In your annual plan should also get something new, what do you plan to do, whether it’s studying the language, losing weight or training, changing jobs or repairing an apartment. Identify important dates, and not only related to work or study, but also with hobbies, and with a personal life.
Plans for the month are also written, but with more detailed elaboration of the terms. You should write them at the end of the previous month, and then you can adjust, as, indeed, the annual plans – this is normal!
Make sure that in the first plan for the month reflected those global goals, which are in the annual. The earlier you start to implement them, the better! It is better to immediately assess the “scale of the disaster” and understand what is about a tenth of what you need to do in the first month. It is the tenth, not the twelfth, because there will be more holidays and vacations, during which you will be occupied with rest, not with deeds.
Do not forget your friends’ birthdays, trips to relatives and other visits. Record all plans in the calendar. Find out which applications you plan to use for planning. Try several electronic and paper organizers or other planning tools.
Plans for the week are made on Sunday evening, or, if you prefer, on Friday. Here it is necessary to filter out the unimportant things clearly! What to fill your week – no question. But how to find the time for the main thing? Therefore, start with the main thing. Write in the plan what moves you to those priority goals that you have been formulated in the annual plan.
Strongly write in the week plan and what you were going to start, but postponed or feared. Did you want to go in for sports three times a week? It’s time to set days and time for training!
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It is better to reflect in the week-long plan everything that will require your time and soul resources to properly distribute them and to weed out all unnecessary or unnecessary. Do not forget to leave in plan time for communication with children and family, for meetings with friends, pleasures and recreation!
Daily planning is the most responsible. After all, it is from the days that our life develops. So, it is at this stage that we project all our future successes and failures. Plan your day best in the evening of the previous day. So you already give yourself an installation in advance, that you can cope with everything and everything you have planned, and wake up immediately with this knowledge.
Set the tasks in the order of priority and do first only the most urgent and important. If you leave the most difficult for later, it will immerse you in a state of stress. It is better to quickly cope with all the difficult or unpleasant and exhale.
True, some psychologists say that this strategy does not suit everyone. After all, we must take into account their own biorhythms too. If you are an “owl” and the peak of your activity falls on the second half of the day, then perhaps it will be more effective for you to tactically increase the complexity of the tasks performed. Either way, the list of your affairs for the day should always be at your fingertips. If at the end of the day all the cases turned out to be crossed out, then your effectiveness was on top!