Tip: Time Management and Achieving Goals

When we take the time to set yearly, monthly, daily goals we save time, energy, and money in the long run. Much of my information comes from several books on time management: The Time Trap, by Alec Mackenzie, The Unofficial Guide to Managing Time, by Dawn E. Reno, Conquering Chaos at Work, by Harriet Schechter, and Ordering Your Private World, by Gordon MacDonald

The real purpose of time management is to allow us to live less stressful lives, have a balance between work and home life, to increase productivity, and to make progress toward goals. Just hearing the words "goal setting" makes some people uncomfortable. As Alec Mackenzie says in his classic book on time management, The Time Trap: "Setting goals for significant accomplishments you want to achieve in your life, both personal and professional accomplishments, costs you nothing. Failure to set them can cost you plenty."

Goals may be set for you as outlined in your job description. You also have goals new goals set in a performance evaluation process. Let's define a goal and flesh it out. Webster defines "goal" as "the mark set as a limit to a race. An aim or purpose." Goals are an end result-what you want to accomplish. They are defined by objectives that then set priorities that affect daily activities and decisions. But it all starts with a goal.

A goal must be:

  1. Demanding-it motivates us to do our best.
  2. Achievable-don't make your goals unrealistically high.
  3. Specific and measurable-a way to know if you've achieved it.
  4. Must have a deadline.
  5. Agreed to by those who must achieve it.
  6. Should be written down.
  7. Should be flexible. Re-examine your goal and make adjustments upward or downward. Don't be quick to lower your goals without first learning how to work smarter. What we're most interested in here is the practical application of goal setting. If we set goals, how does that fact affect our daily lives?

Let's take a very simplistic example:

The Director of Dining Services at a university has a long term goal to daily serve nutritional, taste-conscious, visually appealing, timely and cost-effective meals to the faculty and students. This basically becomes his or her mission statement. It will determine how he or she will spend time. The Director will then set objectives or intermediate targets to achieve that goal:

  1. Speaking with the dietician or nutritionist
  2. Learning about and purchasing the best equipment
  3. Researching low cost, yet good quality food sources
  4. Learning about presentation and color appeal
  5. Hiring experienced cooks and line personnel
  6. Training servers and wait staff
  7. Getting feedback from people as to how he's doing in achieving his goals.

Then he or she will set up monthly or daily priorities from those objectives. These priorities will determine his or her activities. When some activity is presented to him or her that will NOT help achieve this goal it can be eliminated, disregarded without guilt or dilemma. An activity that will not help achieve the goal should not be an activity at all.

Let's review:

  1. Start with long range goals and objectives.
  2. Relate the days' activities to those goals.
  3. Assign priorities to the days' tasks according to their contribution to your overall goals.
  4. Schedule tasks according to priority and to the degree of concentration required.
  5. Stay on track, using your goals to guide you through crises and interruptions and help you make daily activity choices.

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