In the world around us, there are those who are more successful and those who are less successful. There are those who have realized themselves in many areas, manage their lives and understand what they want to achieve in the future. And there are those who “go with the flow.” And all of these are our own choices.
Meanwhile it’s possible to learn how to control your destiny. To do this we need to master the art of setting priorities correctly and implement ourselves in all areas of life that we need to be happy and move forward. How do we learn how to do this?
Similar to betting at 22Bet, there are no universal recipes that work for everyone! But this doesn’t mean that you can’t use the experiences that others have accumulated and tried out. On the contrary, you need to start there. And you can adjust and adapt the advice of coaches, business coaches, and psychologists to your needs later on.
The Primary and Secondary Goals
Do you have the most important, primary goal in life? And the first goal in terms of importance this year? Surprisingly, the word Priority, which originated in the fifteenth century, had no plural for more than five hundred years of its existence! 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 are asked to prioritize ten or more goals for the current day only.
If you let this principle into your life, the feeling of a squirrel running in a wheel will stay with you until retirement. Learn to reduce the number of priorities and clearly understand what your main task is – at least for today to begin with.
Try to understand right away whether this is your goal or one imposed on you from the outside – friends, relatives, management, and so on. In our society, there is so much contact with other people that it’s difficult to distinguish between what we want to do ourselves and what is imposed on us by society. So often more than half of our time is spent doing things that aren’t important to ourselves, but are urgent and important to others.
This doesn’t mean that we should give up helping other people. But it’s important to realize that these aren’t your tasks, and you do them willingly postponing your own work for later.
5 Steps to Managing Your Time
The principles of time management are unusually popular nowadays to make life more meaningful, organized and harmonious. Volumes are written about time management, and still a huge number of psychologists and coaches continue to teach people how to properly manage their time.
Remember, it’s more important not to talk about it, and start to implement in your own life at least some of the principles of time management, and you yourself will understand which techniques suit you and which do not. These principles are quite simple, but it’s 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 you have to make a list of the most important, global goals. And then filter it by degree of importance and urgency. It’s essential to do this.
If you don’t plan for your future, if you don’t have a goal or a plan, then you’re like a boat drifting aimlessly in the ocean, hoping to end up somewhere good.
The second step is to break down big voluminous plans into a list of smaller tasks that you can realistically accomplish. Don’t put off starting the big work! When the plan is voluminous, it scares you, but once you start doing the first of the items, the path to the finale appears already as a list of quite manageable tasks.
The third step is to refuse to do the secondary things. Focus only on the essentials! This is called the Pareto Principle. It says that 80% of the positive results we get by putting in only 20% of our efforts. And the rest of our efforts go to the execution of the remaining small list of cases. So it’s necessary to perform only what we can be effective. And what remains is better to outsource, to reassign, or even discard, as not the most important.
Fourth, be sure to complete one or two deferred tasks per day, as per Example of a healthy meal plan.
And, finally, the fifth – assess your effectiveness, all the time improve it. Do not abandon long-term activities halfway, and bring them to their logical conclusion and set new goals.
That’s all. Although each of the points can be expanded into several lectures. But instead of endlessly studying the theory, it’s better to take methods invented by others, and try to apply them yourself. You’ll quickly figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. After all, managing your time is just a skill. But it makes our lives much more meaningful and structured.