Time Management - How To Put Your Environment To Work For You
By Michael Adams | May 10, 2008
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When most people think about time management, they think about mental discipline, following processes and other hard core “will power” techniques to stop procrastination and get more things done in less time.
Those boring “brute force time management” techniques can work for a while, but if they’re not fun, easy or natural, like anything people eventually just stop doing them. I know I would rather learn ways to improve my time management which are easy and come naturally to me.
Buckminster Fuller (or “Bucky Fuller” as he was called by his friends) is reported to have said “Environment is stronger than will power”. Sounds smart, doesn’t it? Consider this. If you’re out of shape and want to improve your health, how hard would that be to do if you’re locked in room full of delicious sugar cookies. On the flip side, how easy would that be to do if you lived inside of a fitness center? Pretty easy don’t you think?
Most people don’t even stop to think about their environment as they go about trying to improve their time management skills. I think the idea of creating an environment to support your productivity and time management success is something to consider. Try something here for a minute and see what you think.
Take a look around your work space. Pick out 5 easy to indentify objects in it and ask yourself “Does this support my goal to be better at time management or detract from my goal to be better at time management?”
If the element you’re looking at doesn’t support your time management efforts, eliminate it from your environment right then and there.
Most people have at least one element they should toss. Oddly enough, when doing this exercise, people suddenly see their television as a major distraction. Something that not only slows their productivity, but which also can completely destroy your ability to accomplish your daily goals. If you have a television in your work space, unplug it and move it out of the room.
Something as simple as a messy pile of papers can also distract from your productivity and ruin your time management efforts. Realistically, how can a messy desk support your goals? Aesthetics aside, having a pile of papers makes it hard to find the important ones and can even spill over onto the floor, causing further loss of productivity as you have to clean them up.
I used 2 simple examples here because they help make the point clearly. Getting rid of anything in your work space that does not support your productivity and time management goals is critical to your success.
If we were to take this one step further, the next step would be to improve your environment by actually adding things which add to and make it easier for you to accomplish your time management efforts. We’ll share hints on how to do this in other articles.
Topics: Stress Reduction |
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