The 10 Skills of Painless Time Management

If the free market had it’s way, you would buy into the cult of productivity’s belief that you need to stock up on expensive planners, equip yourself with complicated organizing gadgets, subscribe to a dozen trendy web applications and attend $5,000 seminars to start Getting Things Done and putting First Things First.

The trouble is, technology doesn’t solve your time management problems. Those problems aren’t solved by simply “getting organized” and harnessing “willpower” – they are solved by making some pretty significant shifts in your whole mental relationship with time and what you do with it.

All a technology-based solution does is try to force you into someone else’s mode of operation, abandoning the way you do things now (because your ways are wrong!, they say) and taking on someone else’s working style. That rarely works (unless you’re already a fan of that working style to begin with).

Don’t get me wrong – the David Allens and Steven Coveys of the world are all valuable contributors (as long as you don’t take them as gospel). But the idea that a better system will make everything okay is simply not in line with reality. The truth is, you don’t need a better system. You just need to start making incremental shifts in how you treat your time, your focus and your results, and you can track it any damned way that you please.

But when someone forces you into a system – their system – that can become painful. On the other hand, just focusing on tweaking the way you already work? And building new habits using your existing working styles? Now that’s painless time management.

When you’re ready to stop thinking inside someone else’s box, and start building your own, there are 10 skills you can focus on that will make an immediate difference in your life – (regardless of the “system” you personally use to execute). Incremental improvement in any (or all) of these skills will make it a whole lot easier to create lasting, permanent change by tackling easy problems first, and then working your way up to harder ones. When you start making small wins right away, you’ll be more likely to stick with it and get the results you’ve really wanted.

Let me walk you through how you’re going to make these ten skills work for you.

Skill #1 – Staying Motivated / Defeating Self Doubt
The first skill of painless time management is mastering the art of consistent motivation. Now, I know it’s easy to feel motivated after you go to a time management seminar or buy a new planner system, but what usually happens is that the initial excitement fades away and you fall back into the ruts of your old patterns.

Now, this may tend to happen for a couple of reasons. Maybe the system you chose is a lot of work to implement. Maybe you are just meeting up with resistance trying to change the old, comfortable habits that aren’t getting you the results you want. Maybe keeping things the way they are seems kind of, well, ok to you – you know, not great, but acceptable. Whatever the reason, you hit a wall where either the thrill is gone, or you doubt your ability to really take control over your time.

But that’s not how you roll, at least not anymore. You’re going to come up with a way to keep yourself excited about becoming better and better about managing your time. And you’re going to recognize that you also have to bulletproof your confidence, to get yourself to believe that the dabbling is over – you’re going to really do it this time. You’re going to follow through. You nail that, you get your confidence solid and the benefits clear in your mind, and you absolutely will take action on a daily basis to be in complete control of your time.

This is the starting point – you’ve absolutely got to get this part down or you really won’t take consistent action on mastering your time. The bottom line is that if you allow yourself to doubt your abilities to manage your self and your life, you’re going to take a much lower quality of action, if you take action at all. You’re simply not going to get serious about taking control, because on some level you’re going to be living in doubt as to whether you can really manage the insane busyness that is your life. But to start you have to reinforce that belief that you can do it this time.

Think for a moment about all your doubts, all your emotional baggage that has to do with time management. Think of all the times you have felt that you just couldn’t see how you were going to juggle all the things you have on your plate, and all the things you want to do. Think of how it felt every time you had to look at how you’ve struggled with procrastination, or in keeping your focus.

Those are rough feelings, and they drain you, they paralyze you. But in reality, that’s all in your mind. Those feelings, there’s a systematic way to erase them and replace them with the kind of thinking that will not only make you sure that you can take total control of your time, but that will also keep you motivated to keep taking action, even if you have a lot of internal resistance. And mastering that begins to make time management painless because it moves it from something you have to do to something you want to do.

Now, out of all 10 of the skills I’m going to go over, I suggest that you focus on this skill first, since it helps guarantee you’ll follow through on everything else. That said, let’s jump over to the second skill of painless time management.

Please read the rest of this article on Rock Your Day : Painless Time Management