Regardless of your age, gender, working status, or otherwise, time is one of the most important resources you have. Everything you ever hope to do or accomplish in your lifetime will take some amount of time. Learning how to divide your time and use it for things that will improve your life and help you reach your goals is called time management, and it’s something everyone should learn.
Who Needs Time Management?
The skill of managing your time is relevant to all demographics of people. Young people need to manage time to make something of theirs lives; middle-aged people need to manage time to avoid stress while juggling a lot of different responsibilities; elderly and retired people need to manage time to accomplish what they want to in their retirement, instead of letting time just slip idly past.
The truth is that time is just like any other finite resource. If you don’t learn how to manage your time wisely, you won’t be able to get things done as efficiently as possible. You may miss out on meeting your goals, accomplishing necessary tasks, and getting the best out of every activity you do. Even if you do get things done, time management is also about helping you avoid stress in the process.
If you’re always wishing you had more hours in the day, or you feel stressed by everything you need to do, learning time management might be a solution to both of those problems.
Can Anyone Learn to Manage Their Time Better?
While some people may be naturally gifted in organizing themselves, time management is a skill that can be taught and learned. It’s the same as any other resource management. You’ll put a little time investment in at the beginning to plan and strategize how to use your time efficiently. If you’re diligent to learn this skill well, your little investment will help you reap enormous benefits every day.
It’s useful to learn time management sooner rather than later. Take this skill seriously. It’ll help you in every single area of your life, and will make each day less stressful. Learning time management can keep you on top in your career field or classwork, help you stay ahead of busy kids’ schedules, and free up some extra time you didn’t know you had. It’s something anyone anywhere can learn at any point in their life.
Learning Simple Time Management
If time management is a skill, how is it learned? It’s simple to grasp the basic concepts of time management, but difficult to put them into practice consistently in your life. You’ll need these intrinsic resources if you want to succeed:
- Persistence
You need to be consistent in your use of time. It will take persistence to force yourself to use your time as you had planned rather than reverting to old habits.
- Dedication
Without a strong dedication to learning time management principles, you can’t hope to train yourself in this skill. Time management isn’t something you can learn a little bit about and move on. You need to be willing to practice it constantly until it becomes second-nature to you.
- Motivation
Set a goal in your mind that’s pushing you towards better time management practices. Why do you want to learn to organize your time more effectively? Whatever your motivation is, it should be personal to your situation and not forced onto you by any outside source. Do this for your own benefit and you’ll experience a better reward for success.
One issue many people encounter is trying to do too much at once. Because time management is a very basic concept that’s easy to grasp intellectually, it’s easy to assume that you can just start practicing it immediately. You may reorganize your entire schedule, set your alarm for earlier, and plan every detail of your coming days. But, taking such a large step at one time is unlikely to end well.
By trying to do too much at once, you’re setting yourself up for failure. It’s better to start small and work your way up, as you would with any other skill you’re learning. One simple way to start is by looking for your 25th hour. Days only have 24 hours scientifically, but the 25th hour refers to that one hour of free time that’s being wasted every day.
The 25th Hour
According to a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American in 2016 had around 5.13 hours of leisure time daily. This includes all leisure activities, including things like watching TV. You may feel like every hour of your day is incredibly busy, but there’s probably more free time available to you than you realize. You need to sit down and find your 25th hour.
For you, your extra hour of time might be found by cutting out some leisure time spent on activities that don’t better your life or improve your health. It may be found by waking up earlier or rescheduling some of your activities to free up a larger block of time at once, instead of having short 15 – 30 minute breaks throughout the day.
Once you find your extra hour, plan what you want to do with that time. It’s advisable to use it to help you reach a long-term goal. While one hour a day may not seem like much, it really adds up over time, and may be more than enough to get you on the right track. With persistence, you can make sure you’re using this specific time slot wisely and not wasting it. If you don’t start small, you’ll never start at all.
Conclusion
We can’t stop or control time, but everyone can learn how to use their time and energy more efficiently. No matter who you are, what your life looks like, or what you currently do with your time, learning and practicing the skill of time management is going to be beneficial to you. Start looking for your 25th hour today, and use it to make your life better!
