Time Management and Planning Guide

by Raneen Jamaledine Published on January 24, 2018

Time is in short supply, wouldn’t you agree? That’s why we created this planning and time management guide.

Planning and time management are essential skills in today’s workplace as we are getting more and more challenged to do more with less. Choosing what to focus on in our day to day work becomes a necessity that all employees, managers or entrepreneurs should master.

Effective Planning and Time Management are essential to help you succeed and reach your potential.

We will take you through a step by step process to determine what is important to you. For you to be successful in time management, you need to know where to use your limited time well.

Then, you can reflect those important set of goals into your plan. This will help you manage your time to ensure that you will be doing what you planned for. As you then execute your plan on a day by day basis, you will get less stress and much more satisfaction.

As the saying goes “Failing to plan is planning to fail”

So, let’s start the planning and time management process.

First, Setting your Long-Term Objectives

The first step in the planning process it to think as far out into the future as possible by identifying what is important to you. One way to do that is to think about the following:

What will you have liked to accomplish upon your retirement?
Would you want to be a very successful person? a wealthy person? the most liked person? a powerful person? One with high academic status? a great family person?

“When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.” – Leo Burnett

Think about the areas that are most important to you and choose 3 characteristics that matter to you.

Second, Set your long-term plan – Your 3 Year Objectives

Keeping in mind where you want to be when you retire, think about what you want to accomplish in the next 3 years. After 3 years from now, what are the achievable – even if a little challenging – goals that you want to have done. It could be a business that you want to start up, a career move that you want to make, a house that you want to buy, a personal objective that you have or anything like that.

Choose 2 SMART objectives from your professional and 2 from your personal side that you want to accomplish within 3 years.

Then your mid-term plan, Setting your 1 Year Objectives

Keeping in mind what you want to achieve in 3 years, think of the concrete steps that you need to take in the coming year that would help you reach that 3-year objective. A good way to do so is to put one milestone that you want to accomplish each month along the year. Make sure that you are taking into account the 2 personal and 2 professional goals you had in your 3-year objectives.

Manage your time by Setting your Day To Day Plan

What you have put as a plan for the year and on a month to month basis is your guide for what is important for you to do on a daily basis. Every evening or every morning, before you start getting distracted by errands and daily requests, make sure that you put together a list of 5 things that you should do in the day that would help you towards achieving your monthly objectives. Some of these tasks could need more than 1 day to complete, so you can keep them for the upcoming days.

By being in control of your to-do list, you can ensure that you end up doing what is important to you and feel the pleasure of accomplishment. Your plans over time might change, but at least you can always be sure that you are the one that is adapting them and whatever you have done or will do will be aligned with your goals.

As a Conclusion,

We hope that through this Guide you would be able to learn what should be done to have a successful 2018!

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