Taking Charge of Your Time

Everyone knows time is important. We only have so much time to live on this Earth, only 24 hours in each day, only so much time until our next project is due. As Jim Rohn has said, "Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time."

Since each of us has a limited amount of time, we need to carefully manage time. According to a recent study, we waste on average two hours per day What does wasting two hours a day mean?It means we lose 14 hours per week, 60.2 hours per month, and 722.4 hours per year. If we are active 14 hours a day, there are 51.6 days in 722.4 hours. That means we lose more than a month per year to poor time-management, not taking into account weekends or vacations. Before you say weekends and vacations don't count, I beg to differ. While our priorities are different on weekends, holidays, and vacations, time-management is important every day of the year.

Barriers to Time Management

Barriers to effective time management include

• anxiety and worry -- What if I can't get it done in so little time?

• expectations of others -- The boss, friends, family, and who knows how many others.

• perfectionism -- It's hard to manage time when you have a perfectionist streak and you haven't allotted enough time to complete your current task "perfectly."

• fatigue -- it is difficult to work at a good pace when you are exhausted.

• distraction -- and distraction is my biggie.

What distracts me? NOTIFICATIONS from websites, MESSAGES and that includes email, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, MY OWN THOUGHTS -- ideas and concerns that have nothing to do with the task I am trying to complete.

How often do you procrastinate? I procrastinate in some weird ways. I tend to put off paying bills, like the electricity, water, credit card, and my only department store charge, until really close to their due dates. It's as if I am playing a game with myself. Just weird.

To guard against the worst harms that procrastination cause, I have been using Workona to organize my online tabs, to-dos, and notes.

If you are looking for an online organizer, check out Workona!

[Disclosure: I am a Workona affiliate. If you purchase Workona on this page, Workona will pay me a small commission but you pay nothing additional.]

We will be adding more on time management, both as it affects language fluency and as it affects our lives. We will also address the related topic, respecting the time of others.